Fireflies
by darkmouse jumu
Summary: AU/AkuRoku - A demon of fire and light protects the City of Paper alone until a young man, troubled by darkness and dreams, joins him in his small cell and dark fate.
1. The Demon of Light

A/N: Insomnia made this, and as with all things that prevent sleep, it won't let me continue about my way until it's sated. I apologize for any OOC you may find, this story is not a priority as yet, due to other projects. It is a plot bunny gone very, very wild. Rating for events in later chapters.

In short, it wouldn't leave me alone, so here it is.

Disclaimer: I do not, nor pretend to, own any of the featured characters.

At night, the flames and fireflies came at his beckon call. The wind was warm against his face, the moon smoldering orange in the haze of the far horizon, taunting and challenging him.

_Chase me._

_To the ends of the earth with you – pursue!_

Every night, duty bound him to this place, lighting the protective fires against the Dark, the Nihilia.

Every night, he tasted freedom in the glint of stars and turned his back on it, for the sake of those he was purposed to protect.

Days were dank and cold, sheltered in his underground cell and separate from rays of sunlight and an endless, hard blue sky. A preserver and protector at night, Axel coiled in his cell by day, a burden and a captive. A monster.

By day, he slept, his back to the door and the world that made him its tool.

By day, they were the monsters, and he the sheltered and sleeping.

Time held no meaning, his heart a rotting, withered thing as he alternated between cold and warmth, day and night. His only love was the edge of darkness, tattered and torn by the flames guarding the city. His only joy was his freedom, and he exercised it liberally, drinking in the distant energies of the moon and stars to sustain his sway over flames and fireflies.

Built by an ambitious sorcerer, the City of Paper was constructed of spelled parchment, sturdy against fire, water, earth and wind. It thrived on its people's happiness and well-being, its only threat the Darkness that struck at night, the Nihilia that would blot out the spells and blacken the parchment, destroying the city. When the sorcerer had died, he had left Axel and a Creature of Darkness to protect the city. Axel had been found and captured, trusted every night to roam free so long as the fires were lit at sunset and extinguished at dawn. The Creature of Darkness had not been discovered. Axel came to doubt the person existed, always working alone at night and knowing the sun protected the city during the day.

Over origami houses and folded rooftops Axel flew, bounding from basin to basin, bowl to pool, igniting the fires. In the past, he had ignited them all at once, using the fireflies and sending them to each place. As time had moved on he grew bored in the time this left him and resorted to his original training route, a circuit around the wall and then a spiral by aqueduct into the city depths, to accomplish the task. Just as safe, but more time-consuming. More time to fly, to jump and run and gasp for air at the very end, seated on the Watch Tower high above the rest of the city, looking for attempts on his boundaries.

On a night like this, still winded from his run, he caught a shape above the nor'east gate. Heart racing, he ran to meet this foe where it stood, still and waiting, with fire crackling in his palms.

His attack was met with blades, twins of ebony forging and ivory filigree, shaped like keys and sharp like swords. Bleeding hand wrapped in his shirt, Axel leaped backward onto a nearby rooftop, studying his foe.

Shorter and cloaked in darkness, the person crossed the blades and sliced them along each other, the metal shrieking and giving sparks. A final snap and they extended out at either side, at the ready.

"Are you the demon?" The person asked.

Axel's face twisted into a grin. "Demon" was the word the townspeople used. Isolated in his cell by day, even he knew that much. The height and set of the person before him left little question. "It's not good for children to stay up past their bedtime!"

In a rush of wind and shadow the figure was behind him, teeth of the keyblades biting into each shoulder, crossed over his chest. Laughing, the little warrior released him and vanished into the shadows of the night.

When dawn came and he returned to his cell, he was laughing and rubbing at the bruises and small cuts the key bits had left in his shoulders, incensed.

Over the next couple of weeks, Axel began to experience time. It was a strange, sluggish feeling to become aware of hours and minutes, of anticipation and the slow crawl. But every night, especially if the moon was bright, he caught sight of his dark companion running the length of the Wall around the city, hiding in piles of barrels or boxes next to the outer wall or Gates, and once on the very top of the Watch Tower, a stark silhouette before the flames that there burned high. It was the closest look at him Axel got for a good long time. Strong as the wind had been, he'd made out the shape of a young man, neither filled out like an adult nor soft and frail like a child. But he was short, and Axel could not resist jeers over the weeks as he became accustomed to the sightings of his comrade. The boy did seem to be that, always first to strike when the Nihilia loomed at the Wall. For all his obliviousness to the remaining night after his chore was done, Axel did not recall any help fighting the monsters, though this boy seemed to have the city boundaries well under control. He logged this away with every other snippet of information he could glean from shadows and peripheral glimpses. If he was the promised Creature of Darkness, Axel was determined to make friends. Now that the boy was here, the Creature of Light had realized how alone and empty he had been, and how time could be savored just like running and jumping and soaring.

Time could be tricky too, like lighting lamps in the rain. It poured that night, the clouds blackening the sky and stars and moon, leaving him weary and cold. It took forever to light the lamps – the flames were weak and would not take to wick and tinder, sometimes not even to oil or kerosene or fuel. To add to his misery, his shadow-friend was nowhere to be found, though he spent all night just getting and keeping the Wall and Tower fires lit. Dizzy with endless circuits of the damned city, the huge, damp, blasted city, Axel barely felt the approach of dawn. The guards came for him in furies each, snaring his arms and marching back toward his cell faster than he had the energy to keep with. It left him in a bad temper and a building rage as a final, clever burst of shadow broke over his senses.

"Nihilia!" He yelled, breaking free of his guards and stumbling across familiar rooftops and eaves to the rain-slicked wall, where the protective fires had guttered out in the watery onslaught.

_Even if it kills you protect the city protect the city protect—_

Smoldering embers were all he had to throw against the darkness, the threat of dawn pulsing fear of dissolution and evanescence through his tired body. He hit the monster hard, unaware of the speed he'd reached to protect the wall, to keep them from breaching the Wall…

Blind in the rain, terrified by his first real glimpse of the daylight graying the black, wet night, he immersed himself in the shadow and summoned everything he had and flung it out in sparking, weak flames and fading fireflies. Something heavy and hard struck him in the chest and his last sight before his head struck the Wall was a spinning and whirling silver light.

Tricky, tricky time. Slipping by in days while he slept, feeling like meager hours when he awoke, stretching into century-long minutes when he realized he wasn't alone.

A boy shared his cell.

Rising on shaky arms, Axel settled himself into the embrace of a corner. "You're him, aren't you?"

The boy did not reply. Scowling, Axel gestured. "There's no point in denying it. There's only one reason they'd lock you up in darkness with the likes of me."

Still, nothing.

Vision wavering, he sighed. Though able to see better than humans in the dark, the boy was on his side with his face to the wall, his status inscrutable. Axel was too weary to crawl over and see if he was asleep and settled back down on the cold stone floor, hungry for moon and starlight.


	2. Partners

A/N: A second portion of the little wild plotbunny that won't leave me alone to other projects. This whole project is a bit rushed, but I'm feeling guilty for working on it at all instead of a different project I've already promised people. Rating is for the very yaoi content later on. 3

Disclaimer: Characters belong to Square Enix, Disney, or both.

Disclaimer 2: It's been _years_ since I uploaded anything on and I'm very unaccustomed to what sort of document length constitutes a decent-sized chapter. This is further debilitated (that is my word of the week, i think) by this story's erratic set up, its original document being a series of periodic breaks and no real break in the story. To sum it up, I'm having trouble dividing this bitch into reasonable parts and apologize for any abruptness or shortness of chapter.

* * *

"Wake up! Wake _up_!"

He did, and irritably.

"What's your name… Axel? Get up!"

Flinging an arm at his assailant, Axel drew the line at anything so ambitious as _getting_.

"They're threatening to throw you into sunlight if you don't get _up_!"

Let them. He was too tired to care.

"Axel, _please_!"

That voice, though. His fellow guardian's voice. The city be damned, but not the kid that stupid old sorcerer had dragged into this.

"Axel!"

Not his friend…

"I'm awake, what?"

"They want you to get up, to go back to work. They can't protect the city on their own, and…" the boy hesitated. "I can't, either."

"They have fire, let them do it."

"It's not like yours! There have been more and more attacks… Please get up… I can't do this anymore, and I'll have to do it forever if they destroy you!"

Axel shook his head, for all his rest he was unable to see in the darkness at all. "I'm in no condition for that. I can't see."

"You've slept for two weeks!"

That would do it. Even demons had to take sustenance during long rests.

"Is there a moon tonight…?"

"I think so."

_It won't be long before you know it's cycle like the beat of your heart, kid_, Axel thought. "Get me out in it."

"Why?"

Axel leaned against him, surprised by the strength he drew from the warm, human body. "Because in two weeks, I haven't eaten a damn thing and I'm starving."

A full moon would have been better, but even the slim sickle of the new moon was a hot rush on his numbed, waning senses. Though still cold, he could feel the embers in his soul taking light again, coaxed slowly to a blaze over the nights of healing the boy fought for and won for him.

The final night of rest, he collapsed next to Axel on the Watch Tower, the pallid and passive human-fire rolling lazily just two stories over their heads. He was exhausted, panting and gasping after a long run and several fights along the Wall.

"Do you see? Your fire is a better ward."

Axel nodded, watching him. He'd shed his cloak of Darkness to reveal a pale-skinned blond with tousled hair and vivid blue eyes. Not all that different from himself, though he had a bit more brown to his pigment and his hair was a flurry of red spikes. For his pretty looks, the boy was an intense kid, an iron will lending those eyes a determined light.

Axel had little concept of the meaning of years, but discovered the boy had seventeen of them and was called Roxas. Beyond this Axel had learned nothing, except that Roxas was now his daytime cellmate. Axel was left to his suspicions; his rest and the boy's duty to protect and obligation to sleep left little chance for conversation.

At Roxas's insistence, the people of the City of Paper had agreed to allow Axel resting time in the moonlight and starlight. Reflexes left him aching to act and restless, responsibility falling to Roxas to keep him down and resting. Fighting all three fronts exhausted the boy and Axel guiltily tried harder to stay put, and when he got his senses back he persuaded Roxas to sit with him until his skin crawled to warn of approaching Nihilia.

This worked better for the both of them, and was a pattern they maintained after Axel was back on his feet and in full health again.

The city seemed pleased by their teamwork and allowed them to work as they pleased, rewarding Axel's renewed energies and Roxas's persistent reliability with beds and a few worn books for their small, shared space by day.

If Roxas missed the daylight, he said nothing and it was not evident. In the twilight before they slept and before they were released to protect the city they talked and Roxas taught Axel to read. In turn, the redhead taught his young friend the raunchiest bar songs he'd overheard on his vigils in the Depths. Additionally, Axel learned that, though it did not begin to rival moon and star light, human food improved his strength. He disliked eating and drinking unless it was necessary; using the chamber pot was a practice that still unnerved him. Roxas only laughed at him and opened a floodgate of questions, many of which Axel could not answer.

"_Are_ you human?"

Humans did not fear destruction by sunlight, and Axel said as much. The boy smirked and retaliated with legends about creatures called vampires, asserting that things destroyed by sunlight could be human, even if only in the past.

Axel shrugged. "I don't drink blood," he said. "And I think that sorcerer created me."

Roxas shook his head. "It's well-known sorcerers depend on life to create it, didn't you know that? If he created you, he made you from someone human once, like me…"

Now he trailed off.

"Are _you_ human?" Axel asked gently.

"I think I'm somewhere in the middle," Roxas said quietly. "Not quite human anymore, but not something else, either. If I'd been born this way, I think I'd have been a sorcerer. I think you would have, too."

Axel had little known the sorcerer that had created him, and shuddered at the slight, peripheral memories he had, usually changing the subject if the boy prodded too close. Roxas didn't commonly press, allowing the conversation to flow back to the books they'd been given, their cold fates, and strategies to protect the city. After many weeks of growing friendship and rapidly passing time, Roxas did finally persist, his curiosity about the sorcerer that had created them getting the better of him.

It was a dark night when he did. The moon was waning down to almost nothing again, and the Creature of Darkness seemed to be getting a better feel for his nightlife, no longer tossing and turning long into the day with restless instinct to rise with the sun. They had taken to sitting outside the city Wall, on the barren plain stretching into the vast, dark horizon. Axel had been calling fireflies and scattering them about like bits of smoldering parchment adrift on a breeze, the tiny bobbing lights lending gentle warmth to an otherwise chilly evening. Even Axel's fires seemed dimmer.

"What do you think will happen now that he's gone?" Roxas asked, fiddling with a pentagram shape dangling from one of his Keyblades.

Wrinkling his face, Axel let the fireflies go and they bobbed over the wall in search of the bonfires.

"Come on, Axel, you don't think they expect us to do this forever, do you?"

"What if they did?" He countered, averting the boy's curiosity. "What if, two hundred years from now, you and I are still sitting here, waiting for the Nihilia to attempt the Gates again?"

Roxas chuckled. "I'm not going to last two hundred years, Axel."

"Can you really be so sure about that?" Axel prodded, enjoying the way it made the kid squirm. "You're not any more human than I am, Creature of Darkness."

Face scrunched, Roxas was pensive, staring down at the Keyblades resting next to his drawn up knees. Axel leaned back against the wall, tilting his head for a view of the scattered stars. Vague memories drew up shapes between them, finding dragons and warriors, fish and elk captured among many others in the soothing silver lights of the night sky. Something warm wrapped around his arm, the constellations sliding away as he looked down at Roxas clutching his limb, face buried in Axel's upper arm.

"That's almost worse than death," the boy muttered. Axel blinked, surprised by hot liquid rolling down his skin. It was easy enough to shift his arm free and wrap it around the kid's shoulders, pressing the boy's tear-streaked face gently into the crook of his neck.

"It's not worse than being alone," Axel murmured. "Nothing is as bad as that."

Roxas only wrapped his arms around Axel's torso and wept into his shoulder.

* * *

After that night Roxas cheered up again, their conversations shifting again to lighter subjects, but the sorrow never quite left his eyes. A part of him still mourned his missing future, and this reflected clearest in his fighting style. His body became more relaxed and loose, his strikes braver and risks greater. Axel did not remember being human like Roxas did but understood what it looked like when a person threw himself carelessly into the jaws of death. Old memories tugged again, telling him it was a natural reaction, if a little hazardous, that the kid would probably burn himself through.

_Providing he doesn't get himself killed first,_ Axel mused sourly one bad night. It had begun to rain two hours after the fires were lit, and the flames by then were strong enough to be self-sustaining, but for one bowl on the western length of Wall. While Axel swore and coaxed flames up from the diluted fuel, Roxas threw himself in and out of the attacking Nihilia's grip nearby.

Long ago, Axel had grudgingly admitted the kid could see forms he could not, always striking in places to make them scream where all Axel could see was impenetrable shadow, a wall of darkness blotting out star and moon and flame. So he left Roxas to the fight, persisting with a stubborn Watch fire under a dripping eave.

He left the bowl when a human scream pierced the night.

_Roxas!_

He leapt to the Wall with fireballs in his palms and threw them on top of the tall Nihilia, hoping to scare them away long enough to find his friend's body—

_There._

Sprawled and bleeding on the soil near the foot of the Wall, Roxas was unmoving.

Axel didn't even hear his own scream.

Fireflies the size of his head came to his call now, the flames spiraling down his arms in searing ribbons tore at his clothing and took bladed form at his palms. _Chakram_. They sliced through the Nihilia, leaving tattered slivers of night in their wake before the darkness screamed and filled in again, raging and circling in around him. He tripped over Roxas's body and found it shrouded in Darkness, a weedy little monster feeding off the blood seeping from the wounds there. He was just as surprised as it was when it exploded into a livid burst of flame. Fear crept up next, threatening his carefully garnered stores of night-light energy. But instead of diminishing his strength, the exertion only brought him more power, hand in hand with the knowledge of how to use it. It was as simple as jumping rooftops, and for the first time in his miserable service to the City of Paper he witnessed the Nihilia retreat, burning shadows vanishing in wisps and curls of grey smoke. Laughing, he jeered after them until he remembered Roxas.

The boy lay yet where he'd fallen, two wide-eyed guards now at his side. Axel read the fear in their faces with more than a little twinge of regret. As if the rumors weren't enough, now there was proof he was an inhuman monster, capable of combusting his foes without even breaking sweat. They had no reason to fear, Axel's power had dwindled to smolders at the sight of his fallen friend.

Finding no help in the frightened guards, Axel used his shirt to bind the wounds across the boy's chest, slash marks bleeding in thick gobbets. He received no help moving the Creature of Darkness to their shared cell, either, or with extinguishing the fires when dawn crept grey along the distant horizon.

Exhaustion precariously at bay, Axel argued with his guards the whole distance back to the cell, doing his best to convince them that the boy was human enough to need bandages.

Once the door was locked behind them, they did not return.


	3. Teamwork

A/N: Part three of Plotbunny Gone Wild. Apologies for any OOC. Also, additional apologies for mangling the accent that Tia Dalma is just _not_ complete without. One of the reasons I write fanfiction is to improve these points. XD

Once again, not beta-read and edited very little for the purpose of getting the hell on when this damned need for epic is OVER. (Don't be fooled, I'm totally enjoying it, but I _do_ feel guilty about those other projects...)

Disclaimer: All named characters belong to Square Enix, Disney or both. The nameless thugs and drones are mine. XP

BTW: Heaping, awesome and SUPER thank you to all of you reading this! Whether you've left a review, added me to a list of I Want To Know When This Is Updated or of I _Like_ This Story, or are just generally reading it, you have my eternal thanks! To those of you reviewing, thank you for your kind words and gentle suggestions! Future chapters have been altered to reflect some of the things you brought up, and I think it rather changed things for the better. :P

* * *

Axel did the best he could with the bucket of water they'd conceded him, washing the red-lined wounds with his bloodied shirt. The water was thick with clots of blood and filth hours later, the wound bleeding no less than before. Fighting tears, he dropped the ruined shirt to the floor and stretched his hands out over the terrible wounds, three jagged, bleeding lines stretching from the boy's shoulder to the middle of his belly. The flesh still in tact about the wound was feverishly red, swollen and warm to the touch.

It was about to get a lot hotter.

_Chik!_

Axel looked up as the cell door scraped open for a woman to sweep in, giving someone a good piece of her mind as she came, arms laden with the handles of baskets and drawstrings of pouches.

"—foolish ingrates! If I ever catch ye at it again, I'll be settin' a pox upon de lot of ye!"

The door locked indifferently behind her. Laying her menagerie of goods on the floor she appraised Axel, dark eyes sparkling in her dark face, lips turned up in a wry smile. Her way of speaking was like none Axel had ever heard.

"So you de demon, den?"

Axel nodded.

"Many tanks be to ye for savin' de city."

Surprised, Axel blushed. In a rush of dirty skirts she was off again, examining Roxas's wound.

"Um… Who are you?" The redhead managed, as unnerved by her presence as he had been by Roxas's in the beginning.

"Tia Dalma," she replied, fingers working along the length of the wound.

"Can you help him?"

"I can try. You would do best to get some sleep."

"—But—"

"'E's not goin' to be savin' de city again any time soon," she countered. "Dat falls now to you."

Reflecting on this, Axel had little choice but to obey. He curled on his pallet and slept until Tia Dalma woke him when the guards came small hours later, at sunset.

* * *

Aided by the witch's healing, Roxas only took a week to recover. In that time, Axel returned to his old routine, lighting the lamps around the city and then within, sliding down the spiraling, sloped aqueduct into the Depths. Despite not having Roxas's weapons or instincts, he fared well enough on his own with his newfound offensive maneuvers. But while his fire could be used in chakram form as well was by archers to drive off attacks, he and the guards learned that only Roxas and his Keyblades could vanquish the Nihilia.

_A team of light and darkness_, Axel reflected, twisting in midair between buildings in the lower levels to reach a hidden firepot. _Accepted by neither denizens of light nor denizens of darkness._ His face soured as he thought about it, Gemini paired in the grey-area between night and day – facing down the forces of both, ever back-to-back and facing enemies down with steel and fire.

He woke often during the time Tia Dalma stayed with them to heal Roxas, jolted awake by the boy's outcry against feverish nightmares. Most of the time, the witch let him fight through them and gave Axel the sleeping draught. He'd told her to give them to the one who was sick and she merely shook her head.

"'E's always been havin' de nightmares, 'tis de fever dat makes 'im dis way. He said to make sure _you_ get de sleep ye need to protect de city."

That night the lamps burned dangerously bright, some so hot they called the protective marks on the paper nearby to visible defense. This and the guards' unusual distance did nothing to alert him, only the angrily burning forms of the Nihila later that night awoke him to his sour mood. The reason for his bad temper evaded him until he caught himself thinking on the way back to his cell: _he never told me he had nightmares._

A small part of his brain retaliated weakly, _why would he?_ Meanwhile, the rest of his brain ached with knowing they'd been friends for so long and had shared talk of dreams before, but Roxas had never mentioned nightmares. _Be grateful you're an invalid right now, kid, or I'd kick your ass!_ He thought with a glower in the sleeping, sick boy's direction as he flopped on his bed and coiled to face the wall and another day of meager sleep, missing entirely Tia Dalma's amused smile.

When he woke, the clever witch was gone, and Roxas was awake.

* * *

"She told me something interesting," Roxas said after the fires were lit and a skirmish won. They had settled again beneath the large fire on the Watch Tower, the folded paper stones soft and firm beneath their hands, waiting for Axel's skin to prickle at incoming Nihila. Axel merely grunted, still sour about the nightmares and chastising himself for being sour about the nightmares. When he received no answer, Roxas pressed on. "She said that most people barely know about us, only that the lamps go on at night and keep away the shadows. She was surprised that we were treated so poorly, out of fear and distaste rather than the respect we deserve for feeding teeth that bite us."

This didn't surprise Axel in the least. He saw it frequently enough in the faces and eyes of his guards.

"She told me something interesting, too," Axel replied, deceptively casual. "Said you've always had those nightmares that woke you up screaming."

The boy hissed. "I told her not to tell!"

Bristling visibly now, Axel snared the kid's collar. "Why the hell not? We're friends, aren't we?"

Roxas surprised him by looking sheepish. "Well, of course, but…"

Axel released him and rose, seeing a fire begin to gutter in the distance. "But what?"

Flushing and averting his eyes, Roxas missed Axel's hiss of pain as he fell flat on the paper stones of the Tower ledge. Blinking his surprise, the boy got to his feet and called his blades and cloak of darkness, looking for the enemy.

Nothing was there.

Not at all satisfied with the stillness above the whisper-roar of the flames over their heads, Roxas let the Keyblades slip back into darkness and turned to help his friend to his feet. "Are you all right?"

Managing a wry half-grin, Axel hunched a bit and rubbed between his shoulder blades. "Fine, just really confused."

"What was it? I don't see anything on the ground."

"I don't know."

But Roxas's eyes darkened and he circled around to look at Axel's back. The man's coarse white shirt was unmarred.

"Do you see anything?"

"No," Roxas said. "Take off your shirt."

"What?"

"Take it off," the boy insisted, voice snarling.

Bewildered, Axel obeyed the angry teenager with swords and took off his damn shirt. Behind him, Roxas sucked in his breath. _That can't be good._

He turned around to ask the boy what the matter was and found him gone. When he returned, it was from the top of the Tower with a rag burning on the end of a stick. Roxas glowered at him. "Turn around."

"Oh hell no!"

"Turn around!"

"At least tell me what—" his voice failed him in favor of a burst of pain. Roxas had darted behind him and thrust the burning stick against the place the object had struck him.

After the initial sear of pain, all he felt was his own fire and harmless tingle of it along his skin. He had thought once it ignited on another power source it would burn him like anyone.

The tip of a Keyblade he certainly felt as it sliced his skin open. Falling to his knees and shaking, he roared when the fire pressed to the fresh wound, igniting on something writhing in the flesh there.

"Sorry," Roxas said over the din of mangled cries. "It's necessary."

The pain rose to an unbearable zenith before Axel finally sensed something heavy fall away from him. The pain faded quickly and then was gone.

"It's lucky you can touch your own fire so easily," Roxas mused darkly, stomping something with one booted foot. Trembling, Axel turned around, gasping.

"What did you _do_ to—What the fuck is _that_?"

Roxas looked down at the black remains of something slimy and gelatinous under his boot. "I'm not sure, but I know what it does. It was burrowing under your flesh, Axel, and once it reached your heart, you'd have become a Nihilia."

With one dark look, Axel finished the smashed remains with fire. Roxas backed away hastily.

"And how do you know that?" the redhead snapped.

Roxas looked sheepish again, but didn't avert his gaze. "We'll speak about it at dawn."

"Why not now? The Nihilia aren't attacking."

The blond sniffed. "You didn't even sense that coming. No, you need to be able to defend your back now, since your instincts won't help us there." Seeing the doubt in Axel's face, the boy's shoulders slumped. "I _will_ explain everything, okay? Don't look at me like that."

Shrugging, Axel popped his neck. "So how do you think I should protect myself when it got through my shirt like that?"

Roxas turned pensive, resting his chin on his fingers. "I'm safe enough with the shroud," he said, showing Axel his dark cloak when the man raised one red eyebrow. "But you can't access the shadows like that."

"Nope," Axel said sourly.

"A shield wouldn't work, unless it was set on fire…" the boy looked up. "Can you make a cloak of fire?"

Axel bit his lip. "Fire's got to have fuel, kid. Without a shape for it to burn, it'll go out."

Roxas grimaced. "Well, stay close for now. We have to warn the guards."

"Aw, can't we just let them die?"

"No, we'd have to kill them when they turned to Nihilia."

"That would be more work than they're worth."

Flashing him a smile, Roxas stood in front of him with his back turned. "You're not going to like this, but take my hands."

Axel did so, hoping the boy didn't turn around and find it in his face that the contact was definitely not unwelcome. Hands clasped, Roxas summoned the shroud around both of them.

"Is this really necessary?" Axel asked. "You could just burn it out again."

The boy's hands tightened as they hopped at the edge of the Tower, Roxas searching for a good spot to jump. "I don't want to repeat that," the boy said hoarsely.

"So how do we get down?" Axel asked snidely.

"Shut up, I'm thinking!"

Axel released his hands. "Lucky for you, I'm faster." Leaving the shroud, he slipped around and knelt before him. "Get on my back. You focus on your shroud and protecting us and I'll get us to the guard posting at the main gate."

"What about the wound on your back?"

"It'll be fine, just get on."

Muttering, Roxas cinched his legs around Axe's slim waist and clung with his arms around his shoulders. Axel fastened his arms beneath the boy for support and bounded off, traveling as fast as the extra weight allowed. Leeches fell twice more, sprawling them across rooftops and off an eave, but without penetrating Roxas's shroud. Once at the gatehouse Roxas slid down and Axel let him lead, being that the boy knew more than he.

They were too late. Three guards had already turned and had been trapped inside the gatehouse, their former comrades blocking the door. Despite the situation, the humans drew weapons when the Creatures of Light and Darkness drew near.

Roxas's flat expression was long familiar to Axel and he could see the irritation lurking behind the boy's neutral mask as he spoke. "Peace. We mean you no harm."

The captain took a defensive stance in front of the gatehouse and his companions. "We've been given orders to punish you for allowing the Nihilia to compromise the Wall."

"The Wall has _not_ been compromised!" Axel snarled.

Roxas nodded. "He's right. The Nihilia have found another form of attack. Until we find means to negate this onslaught, let us destroy the infected within." He gestured toward the gatehouse.

Sharpened steel glinted in the firelight. "Those are guardsmen in there," the captain snapped. "Or have you turned against us?"

"No," Axel snapped. "Should that day come, the lamps would not be lit."

"We intend no guardsmen harm," Roxas continued peaceably. Axel wondered where he got the patience and the diplomacy. _Probably his human education_. "Those inside the gatehouse are no longer your comrades and never will be again. They are infected and Nihilia now. Save your energy and let us destroy them, as is our duty."

A tense silence fell and the captain regarded them, his comrades, then Axel and Roxas again. "You will explain everything when they are destroyed."

Roxas conceded with a bow. Axel mimicked it awkwardly. The guards moved aside and let them enter the house. Axel led this time, kicking the door inside with a burst of crackling flames. Summoning bright fireflies, he formed a ring of flames and spun it the width and length of the building. "Hallooo in the house!" He called mockingly, looking for miscast shadows or blank spaces. There was nothing.

Behind him, Roxas swore.

"Damn," Axel echoed tamely. "The windows are in tact. Fireplace?"

Bright blue eyes appraised the gatehouse, following its structure attentively. Finding no trace of the shadows, Roxas hissed. "Chimney. Take the roof, Axel. If they're in there, send them to me."

Axel agreed by dashing out the door and leaping easily onto the paper-slate roof, boots silent with practiced expertise. No sign of the newly formed Nihilia here. His skin was crawling, but that only meant they were near, in the area around the City of Paper. He had no means of exacting their location.

Roxas's shroud had proved time and time again over the months to be immune to the severity of Axel's fire attacks. In spite of this, Axel found himself wary and cautious of both his friend in the gatehouse and what damage this would bring to the building.

The chimney was a rectangular thing of complex, interlocked paper bricks. No mortar, no glue, simply spelled parchment, sturdy and virtually invulnerable. Standing so close he now felt them, writhing within the narrow space. Outstretched, his palms lingered just moments over the hollow center of the chimney before he fell, the paper beneath his feet turning to a thick black mucus.

Hands and knees broke his fall, poorly absorbing the shock and sending aching pulses of pain through his limbs. Unable to hold himself up, Axel fell on his stomach, curling around himself.

_--he made you from someone human once—_

Beyond the ringing in his ears, Roxas was screaming something and the guards were a steady drone of voices beyond the open door. The world went dark then, though Axel's other senses remained, his body tingling where it faced the ceiling.

_The…shroud?_

If he could have gained his feet he'd have done it then, realizing this left Roxas unguarded against the new Nihilia attack. Panic pounded in his throat as heavy objects began to strike the shroud, hard and fast and over and over again. _Rocks?_ Axel thought briefly, human panic welling higher in him, the darkness of the shroud working against his moon and starlight fed energies.

Roxas gave a snarling scream, but neither Axel's hands nor his legs would obey.

_Dammit!_

Finding strength at last, he shoved off the shroud and scanned the revealed room. The wall where the fireplace had been was heaped and shining muck piled against the Wall, staining it but leaving it in tact. Part of the ceiling was gone too, and there were quite a few more Nihilia in the gatehouse now, and some without, keeping watch and tearing the remaining human guards to pieces with shadowy teeth.

Blood was everywhere, spattered against walls and spilled across the floor. Axel stomach lurched; eyes finding a familiar form slouched against the wall. He cared nothing for the guards or the humans, but every time he caught sight of Roxas slouched in defeat, or worse, fire took to his veins. By the time he reached the boy's body, every Nihilia in or around the former gatehouse was burning merrily, and a few of the still-human corpses as well.

Roxas's shaky breath was no comfort. His skin was mottled from beneath with long, slug-like shapes, wriggling as they infested his body. With the shroud missing he seemed nothing but a boy in plain clothing, arms, collar and neck exposed and writhing unnaturally.

His fire would not burn him, and that had been a great mercy. Roxas would not be so lucky. He'd been singed before, during battle. Mind turning, Axel cast about for something he could use to open the boy's flesh. Always relying upon his fire, he had no weapons.

But Roxas did.

The mysterious blades still lay at his sides, wrapped tight in his hands. In the end, it was best he could not pry them free. He recalled no sheaths, no means of storage when the blades were not in use. Like his chakram, the weapons came when summoned and vanished when dismissed, obedient to Roxas alone. As they lay still in the boy's hands, he could use them and did, stabbing and burning the writhing, fat slugs each in turn until all fallen to the floor in pieces. Bleeding from a score of flesh wounds and holes in his clothing, Roxas opened his eyes to blue slits.

"Axel…?"

The redhead was already tearing up his own shirt, bandaging the bloodiest of the boy's cuts.

"We're not done yet," was all Axel said. Nodding, Roxas remained still long enough to be bandaged then got shakily to his feet. The Creature of Light knelt before him again. "Get on. You're the only one who can destroy them, so stick to your arms."

Reduced by this to one Keyblade, Roxas summoned a thin cloak around them and clenched the white hilt tight in his right hand. "Ready."

Axel left the empty, blackened room for the monsters still afire outside. His legs still hurt from the fall, his arms still weak. Roxas's grip around his collar didn't have the strength it had on their way here. He struck infrequently, focusing on aim and timing as Axel ducked and weaved between mounds of shadow. He made frail observations as he went, noting his fire was less deterring to them, whether the monsters were surrounded by it or immersed in it.

Halfway into a residential district, the Nihilia were suddenly gone. Axel turned, looking for traces of survivors. Fending off fatigue, he searched the avenues leading away from the gatehouse until was moderately satisfied that the entirety of the invading Nihilia had been destroyed.

Back at the gatehouse, more living, human guards had gathered, eyeing the lumps of blackness and mangled corpses the infested guards had left behind. Roxas still on his back, Axel knelt to examine the piles of muck and found a human-like corpse vaguely shaped there, distorted by the layers of goop. What remained of the face was a mask of horror without eyeballs, the remaining black-filled hollows seeming to stare out at him. Quickly, he backed away from the muck as the new arrivals approached.

"What happened here?" Demanded a guard, wearing an admiral's mark so far as Axel's depleted vision could see.

"The Nihilia have a new means of attack," Roxas croaked from Axel's shoulders, both arms trembling where they clung about the redhead's collar. "Black slugs fall from the sky now, infesting any life they touch with darkness and turning that life to their own ranks. They seem to find their forces insufficient enough to resort to create them from our own."

"How are they doing it?"

Axel was wondering that himself, and suspected Roxas was too. But again, the boy had answers.

"They self-destruct."

"They have not breached the Wall before, how can they get so high above it to pose threat to the city?"

"That I have not witnessed and cannot say," Roxas said. "Some of your men were infested and we offered to vanquish them and in the peace that followed to devise a plan of recourse. By the time I found out they self destruct, it was far too late to do anything but put your men out of their misery."

A sudden cry broke the night, echoing in sudden silence. Axel turned and found a guard pulling his sword free of a human comrade's body. _So mercy killings are standard procedure already,_ Axel thought sourly, noting in spite of himself that the man had little left to carry into what life he might have had.

"How can we protect ourselves?" The admiral asked Roxas.

The boy sighed then, the breath ragged near Axel's ear. "Assemble the Paperwrights. Build a strong net to dome the city. At night, fire will burn atop it long and bright. Redistribute the regular lamps to fall beneath the holes."

At these orders, the admiral gazed disapprovingly long and hard at Roxas. The boy only gazed steadily back as near as Axel could see, and at last the admiral gave in.

"Very well. We will see what shall be done. Do you still intend to uphold your duty?"

"Of course," Roxas gave a shadow of a smile. "No one but my friend here can light the lamps, and no one but me can vanquish the Nihilia."

At this bone-bare truth, Axel left them and went heavily back to the Watch Tower, Roxas still clinging weakly to his shoulders. The night was not over yet.


	4. Respite

A/N: Sorry! I didn't mean to leave a month between posts! My job is... distracting (actually, it's the final circle of hell, but full details are usually ranted to my DA journal, much to the disdain of my watchers). This chapter is the first definite reason this story has the rating it does. Be gentle! Only one person has seen me write, er, things like _that_ scene before you guys. Sorry if any of it seems abrupt, out of character, or underdeveloped - again, only doing this for fun. Hope you can enjoy it or at least not have your eyes burned out by it. XD

Disclaimer: Featured characters belong to Squeenixney.

* * *

By the end of the night the Nihilia had not attacked again and Roxas was rested enough to walk on his own back to their cell. Tia Dalma met them briefly there, attending to Roxas's wounds with firm rapidity before examining Axel's knees and wrists. She bound them in foul-smelling gauze and ordered the bandages to remain until their second dawn. After this, she left them once more.

The boy pushed his bed across the cell to Axel's, and when he laid on it his shoulders were still trembling. It made him feel bad when he had to interrupt the boy's rest for questions.

"You said you'd explain."

Stiffly rolling to face him, Roxas studied Axel's face with his own drawn, tired features. He no longer looked the half-grown human boy Axel had allied with and later befriended, but an aging man at the end of his youth. Though they both could see well in the dark, Axel lit a couple of fireflies and let them meander about the cell lazily, lending warm light to the press of darkness. It was no retreat for either of them tonight.

"We brushed death tonight, Roxas," Axel continued. "If our luck doesn't hold, I at least want to know everything I can about all this before it kills me."

Roxas kept his silence as he debated, indecision crawling over his fatigued features. He played his fingers over the worn pallet, gaze down to follow the pattern of thread. Axel pulled a blanket over, scooting closer so it would cover them both and resting a hand gently in the boy's hair, no longer oblivious to pain behind the indecision. The gesture won him and Roxas slid in and settled up against Axel's chest, arms trembling where they wrapped around Axel's back.

Sighing, Axel let the need for explanation go and clutched him close, resting his chin against thick, tousled blond hair. They were still alive and safe for now, and for them the present meant more than any future could promise, both knowing neither _had_ a future.

Even mulling over this and their scrape with death, Axel still found peace in the boy's arms, comfort and strength in the soft warmth of him.

For now, it was enough.

* * *

Darker now and laden with tension, the nights were no longer chores and the time between. True to his word, the admiral had assembled the Paperwrights, those trained and left by the sorcerer to maintain or expand the City. By the first nightfall a suitable cover had been wrought, though it was not strong enough to support even the weight of one tall, skinny demon, it supported a shallow reservoir of slow-burning oil, and this Axel lit cheerfully before returning to his old route and the lamps below.

The cover hung low over each building and was tight about the Watch Tower where the Creatures were to maintain their vigil once burning eaves had been set up around the top of the Tower. All night he rarely saw more than glimpses of Roxas as he kept pace with the boy under cover of the fire shell and provided back up while his dark-enshrouded friend faced the shadows alone.

Until he could protect himself, he'd be no use to him. Roxas knew it, eyes troubled with the awareness of Axel's weakened effect on the Nihilia. Desperate measures or not, the Nihilia were getting stronger. How long before he was useless and taken into the sunlight? How long before Roxas was surrendered to total darkness? How many minutes were left? Hours? Did they still have days to live?

Morbid thoughts of mortality and failure and becoming obsolete plagued him greatly, his will against it as weak as his flames had become against the Nihilia. Roxas didn't speak about anything now, merely collapsing close to Axel at dawn for a long, hard sleep before a long, hard night of circuiting the Wall. Axel held him close when he could, rubbing his back as he slept and trying to leech enough warmth from his friend's body to warm the chill away from his heart.

A month went by this way, then a second. The Paperwrights rapidly perfected a protective, fire-ready shell over the city. Rumor among the nightfolk had it that the dayfolk wanted no part of the sunlight-blocking monstrosity. Loud and long the Admiral and his men spoke against the Nihilia, warning the civilians of the horrors that descended at night, finding more and more disagreement among the people as they tried to answer all questions. The night guards were sour and grumpy at night now, and Axel did his best to stay out of their path. He had no answers either.

Not for lack of trying, though.

Roxas, in spite of his reassurances that one mad night, remained tightlipped on the subject, usually out of exhaustion. Axel still had not found a way to protect himself and Roxas was left to run the Wall alone. The only things that had really changed were the difficulty of their duty and the unspoken decision to keep sharing the beds and blankets. Axel kept him in close, hoping the kid could draw strength and peace from him the same way Axel did.

It was clear now that the boy had nightmares, vibrant and frightening ones. No matter how times Roxas snapped out of bed, screaming and striking out in fevered panic, he never once explained, though his eyes belied any chance of pleading forgetfulness, often shedding tears of terror and deep sorrow.

It was only a matter of time, really, before Axel had enough.

Waking to his friend's panicked cries and gasps for air, Axel sat up next to him and pulled him between his knees, back to Axel's chest. Pressed into the wall at the head of their bed, Axel held him tight and let him cry himself dry. Once the boy had calmed down, Axel turned his friend by the shoulders and put small distance between them. Gently, he left a light kiss on Roxas's lips.

Stunned, Roxas only blinked at him.

Axel brushed hair out of the vibrant blue eyes, watching patiently for messages in the familiar young face. He'd wait him out all day if he had too. Wordless, Roxas leaned in for another slight, tentative brush of lips before he abruptly pressed against Axel, pinning him to the wall and deepening the kiss. Hilt-calloused hands pulled through his hair, the boy's breath hot against his cheek as they stopped, resting against each other. Unfamiliar with passion, Axel was more confused by his pleasure than he was by Roxas's eager response, heart beating frantic cadences beneath his ribs. Roxas's cheeks were warm beneath Axel's palms and once more the redhead kissed his friend, lightly.

"I care about you Roxas, more than anyone, and that will never change, understand?"

Between sets of Axel's long fingers, Roxas nodded.

"Tell me about your nightmares," Axel said. Roxas's face pivoted away and Axel pulled him back, bringing them eye-to-eye. "Tell me, Roxas, because it makes my chest hurt every time I hear you scream."

Roxas traced Axel's lower lip with gentle fingers. "Is that why you kiss me?"

"The part about my chest hurting is."

"But do you love me?"

"Very much."

"How do you know? Are we even capable of that? What are we, anyway?"

Axel took the boy's chin between finger and thumb and held his eyes. "Do you love me, Roxas?"

For a long time, Roxas stared indignantly at him, blue eyes afire. Then he nodded and tears slid down to Axel's fingers, warm and wet drops of pain.

Axel embraced slim shoulders at this affirmation and listened with chills spiderwalking his spine as the boy cried and told Axel how he would die.

The next night it rained again. Roxas reported over the chaotic pounding of thunder that the kamikaze Nihilia attacks had depleted. They stood huddled against the freezing sheets of rain on the Watch Tower, taking a short rest and reevaluation of things before separating again. Roxas continued his battle circuits around the city and Axel maintained the lamps, far too many of them failing in the watery onslaught. With the shield over the City complete and more than capable now of supporting human or demon weight, the Paperwrights had moved on to designing more effective lamps. The news left Axel simmering and cross, both for realizing how lightly the people of the City of Paper had taken the Nihilia threat and their salvation from it and his own blindness to it. His cell, the guards that feared him rather than worked with him, the variety of types and the wear on some of the shoddy lamps provided by the people, the words of Tia Dalma – it was almost myth to them, and their preventative measures were slapdash at best.

Knowing when and how he was going to die did not help his mood much, either.

Roxas eyed him, eyes betraying his regret in telling him about the precognitive nightmares. They'd begun when he was younger, visions of twin blades and night fights. When the Keyblades had come to his call in a scuffle with other kids, he ran away and began working with Axel. Since then, his nightmares had been of different natures – some simply fear of the Nihilia. But the recurring dreams were the ones that held truth, and Axel's death Roxas had seen many times. Shaking water from his spiky hair, Axel leaned over and kissed him soundly, smirking when the boy gave in and opened his mouth.

"We should get back out there," the Creature of Light said as he broke the kiss, rising to his feet and stretching. "Some of the hub fires are already out."

Nodding, Roxas rose and sneezed.

"Oi, tell me you're not taking ill."

Roxas shrugged, smirking wickedly. "If I am, so shall you as well." And with a final kiss to drive the point home, Roxas called his shroud and blades as he vanished into the wet, stormy night.

* * *

The tempest continued into the morning. Shielded by spellcraft, the City of Paper had nothing to fear but soggy traveling from place to place. The Demons of Light and Darkness all but ran back to their cell shivering and thoroughly soaked. They were still trying to warm up when their morning meal came without the mercy of extra clothes or warm soup. The bread, cheese and sausage were cold as usual. Once they were through with their meal, however, Axel kept the cups of water that came with it for the day and heated the contents carefully so Roxas could handle the cup afterward. While they sat huddled under blankets and pressed shoulder to shoulder, Axel lit a small fire in the old water pail from Roxas's first bad injury. It was dry now, but metal and sturdy enough to support a meager fire. Weak flames were all they could hope for, Axel explained. There was nothing flammable that could be spared. Nodding, Roxas sighed and rose from the blankets, peeling off his remaining clothing and spreading it flat in front of the pail. Starting naked back toward their nest, he found Axel gaping and colored, shrugging. "Sorry. Not a bit of it's dry."

Wordless and flushed, Axel followed his example, settling back under the blankets deep in thought. Roxas wasn't the juvenile he'd taken him for in the beginning and he'd seen him nude several times since they'd met, his not-quite-grown body muscular and relatively healthy and very attrac… He scowled. Kissing complicated everything.

For a very long time, they sat bundled in blankets and trying not to be uncomfortable in tandem with trying to sit close enough to share body heat. Axel snuggled in closer, relying solely on shoulder-heat, wondering if they shouldn't just divide up the two blankets and cocoon for the night. Stupid rain. Stupid heart. Stupid shivering half-human tendencies. If not for Roxas still shaking beside him, he'd have conjured fire all around himself to evaporate all the remaining water like he always did after it rained. Then he could curl up in the stagnant, dry cell air and slee—

_Could I block the Nihilia's slugs that way?_

He was halfway to giddy with finally solving the problem when it dawned on him he'd have to run about the city naked. He'd never tried self-combustion with his clothing on, as it wasn't likely that they'd be replaced without comeuppance once destroyed. Nonetheless, the epiphany righted his mood and brightened his temper. Leaning back on the bed, he let his end of the blankets fall to his waist and gave Roxas a lopsided grin when the boy turned to glare at him for letting the cold air into the cocoon.

"We're being pretty silly about all this," Axel mused. "If you really think about it."

Roxas gave a sigh and conceding tilt of his golden head, lips curled discontentedly.

Axel patted the mattress. "Lie down already. We've always been warmest this way."

"Hell no! I won't ever get to sleep!"

Opening his mouth to protest, Axel took in the blond's flushed face and thought better of it. He wasn't sure he could keep his hands to himself and saw Roxas didn't feel any more confident. Axel sat up and reached for him. Roxas backed away, eyes wide.

"Relax. I won't force you. Just kiss me, all right? You know, good night. I can't maintain the fire much longer."

"I _can_ see in the dark, you know," Roxas muttered, letting Axel get close. The redhead kissed him, gentle but firm, his long fingers leaving light tingling sensations where they traced Roxas's nose, lips, jaw, throat, collar bone. His kisses were no less erratic, some deep and tongue-tangling, others feather soft and so tender the boy's eyelids didn't so much as tremble beneath Axel's lips.

"Would you be looking?" Axel said after long warm minutes passed in the glow of firelight, cheek-to-cheek with Roxas, nimble fingers curved to Roxas's muscled chest. At his ear, the boy gave a satisfied, surrendering sigh.

"I would."

"So would I," Axel replied quietly, extinguishing the small fire with a flutter of that deep place in his chest whence all the flames and fireflies and good things came. Darkness fell and Axel lowered Roxas gently to the bed as their eyes adjusted, seeking the familiar shape among flitting miasmic shadows. Toned now in grayish shades of indigo, Roxas lay with his arms bent at the elbows and ready to push him up to flee. Blue eyes were wide and closer in color to chalk now than rhinestones, his toned chest and muscled belly, strong from hundreds of skirmishes with the shadows, rose and fell faster than usual. Straddling him, Axel bent down and kissed him like he had on the Watch Tower, giving to desire slowly as Roxas relaxed and opened more of his body to him, moans forming low in his throat while Axel explored with eager fingers and sensuous tongue.

"Axel…"

Green eyes looked up from Roxas's warm abdomen, finding the younger man's face distressed. Pale fingers curved to fit the back of Axel's neck and drew him forward until their lips met. Despite Roxas's uncertainty, Axel found his companion's lips welcoming as arms slipped around his back and fingers tangled in his red spikes. He pressed Roxas into the pallet with hard kisses, leaving the blond's soft lips swollen. Roxas squirmed when Axel's hands reflected his aggression too, but he didn't pull away. When Axel looked, the face around vibrant, dark-chalky blue eyes was torn between flushed desire and embarrassed fear. His heart gave a meaningful shove and he relented. Instead, he spent long minutes exploring Roxas's face, scalp, neck, torso, hips and legs with his hands to memorize the spread of the warm body beneath him. Roxas lay back on the pallet, eyes narrow and brows drawn in and up, mouth conceding small moans and gasps.

The image hit his mind like a bomb when he looked, detonating the contents in the general direction of his hips. They pooled in his chest with an overwhelming surge, crashed behind his stomach and careened into the pulsing heat between his legs.

This took the mere flicker of a second and left him gasping and reaching for Roxas's warm mouth and the blond's stiff arousal. Beneath him, the boy gasped as Axel bit at his lips for entry, hands roaming behind the supple thighs at either side of him. On top they were muscular and hard with tension, belying the boy's remaining nervousness, but below they were less so, warm and firm and sensitive to Axel's probing fingers as he worked toward the pelvis. When he found what he was looking for, Roxas hissed at the abrupt touch and Axel pulled away and began more gently to work the blond's muscles with saliva-slicked fingers. When two fingers fit easily, Axel brought their hips together. Roxas gripped the redhead's arms, eyes wide and teeth clenched.

"I'll go slow," Axel promised hoarsely, kissing the boy's knee where he'd hooked it over his shoulder. Even slowly, Roxas grunted in pain, nails digging into Axel's biceps.

Head spinning with desire and new sensations, Axel willed his eager muscles to not move while he ran his fingers through Roxas's hair, leaving light, tender kisses on the pale, pain-wrinkled forehead. Roxas clung to him, his muscles around Axel flexing as he tried to relax.

"Are you okay?" Axel gasped.

It was all he could do to stay still, to not move. Biting his lip, Roxas fidgeted with Axel's hair. Axel took both hands and kissed them. Finally, Roxas closed his eyes, nodding.

"Are you certain?"

Again, he nodded.

"Roxas…"

With a snarl the Roxas he'd first met on the battlements, battle-ready and stern, surfaced and frowned his determination with an angled thrust of his hips. Then he was gone, replaced again by desire and the look of helplessness as Axel gave in and began to move, watching the boy's face for the first signs of pain. It was not easy. Roxas's body was hot around him, meeting his thrusts with better and better rhythm, enveloping Axel's mind with ecstasy. Even as he shifted to press in harder, Roxas's crescendo of moans and cries reflected no pain that he could discern, though the boy's sounds of pleasure began to take a desperate note that agony often shared. Axel's spine chilled briefly knowing that if he did cause him pain, he did not think he could stop now. The walls and floor and ceiling were gone now, faint as they were in the darkness. There was only Roxas, covered in sweat and gritting his teeth until passion forced his jaw open for the keening of his voice.

It was Roxas's scent that filled his mind, Roxas's fingertips scalding Axel's skin. No one elses's heartbeat pounded in Axel's ears as the world burst. Gasping and shaking, Axel fell on the pallet next to the boy and reached for him. Roxas rolled heavily into his embrace, trembling all over and damp with sweat, panting against Axel's chest as the older demon pulled long fingers through dampened blond hair.

For an eternity Axel lay awake in their night, body coiled around his lover's protectively, stroking the boy's back and suddenly afraid.

His muscles were stiff when he reached for their blankets and wrapped their naked bodies tightly. Asleep, Roxas sank back into his embrace when Axel offered it, only parts of his cheek, nose and forehead visible where he snuggled against Axel's chest. Axel kissed his forehead, damp hair and all, and rested his throat against the tousled blond hair, hoping they didn't regret it later.


	5. Know Your Limits

A/N: Again, apologies for the lateness here. Life took some...unexpected turns. My angle on writing this changed as well; in the beginning I cared little for it and now I have drawings and developmental notes all logged into my mind. The angst that originally fueled it has passed, for the most part. I apologize if this changes what you originally found you liked about my writing. Updates should be faster; my _modus operandi_ dictates I finish chapters before I post preceding chapters, so I can safely say this _will _be finished soon; i'm editing the final chapter.

All of you who've left reviews: Thank you so much! I've rarely had opportunity to expose _any_ of my written work to others, so feedback is incredibly valuable. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for your time and your kindness!

Disclaimer: Characters belong to the Squeenixney entity, and in no way to me. There's no accounting for how awkward or inaccurate the portrayals here might be, but I nevertheless stake no claim on anyone herein. 'cept maybe a few of the guards.

The guards did not approve of their coupling, and expressed their jeers by doing their job waking them up, but with rocks. Wrapped in Axel's arms and the blankets, Roxas's position was clear but sheltered. Axel was not so fortunate, and woke cranky and snarling to a well-aimed shower of stones. Sighing, he woke Roxas, careful to not expose him to the falling stones and warning him that the guards had regressed to juvenile mind.

Roxas sat up anyway, never in very good disposition at first waking, got to his feet naked and scowling in a shower of stones. Then he summoned one of the Keyblades and swung it, sending an oncoming stone back twice as hard to brain its thrower between the eyes. The guards stared as Roxas let the blade disappear and went quietly for his clothes.

The stones stopped, but the guards remained, examining their comrade and working up indignation. Inspired by his friend, Axel lit their boots on fire for good measure and smirked long after they disappeared hooting and swearing down the corridor. Axel stood then and went to the boy, standing with Roxas's back against his chest and sliding his hands down the boy's half-clothed body. Roxas didn't even pause, belting his pants and reaching for his shirt and pulling it stiffly over his head. Axel turned him around, but could not earn his eyes. He gripped the boy's chin and forced him to meet his gaze.

"Did I hurt you?"

Defiantly, Roxas jerked his face free and bent to pick up a wad of clothing from the floor, shoving it against Axel's chest. He was still scowling when he met Axel's eyes again. "We've really done it now, you know," the boy hissed.

"What? You mean the guards? Trust me, they're sluts off-duty."

"No! Axel, you asked me to tell you about the nightmares, about why I'm here. Think about it! I watch you die in my sleep now to wake up holding you in my arms_._ Do I have to spell it out for you?"

"I did hurt you." Axel whispered, seeing the weary pain in the boy's eyes now.

"Yes!" but Roxas's shoulders sagged. "I wouldn't have it any other way, but dammit…"

Axel embraced him, clutching him close.

"You're not making this any easier!" The boy snapped, fighting him off.

Axel let him back away. "You just said you wouldn't have it any other way," he reminded Roxas gently.

"I didn't say that meant it didn't hurt! It hurts! It all _hurts_, and when you touch me I think I could cry, knowing…"

Axel slammed the smaller man against the wall, hands tight on the blond's shoulders. "Then why did you let me, last night?" He hissed. "Answer carefully, Roxas. My heart's in this, too."

"Because I wanted you to!"

Axel pulled away a little. "Would you rather I never touch you again?" He asked, watching tears form in luminous blue eyes.

"No!"

"Then what would you have me do?"

Resolve unified Roxas's distraught features, his sapphire gaze was unwavering, even piercing, now. "Don't _die._"

Axel pressed him hard against the wall with his whole body then, hands planted against the wall at either side of Roxas's head, faces close enough to touch. "All things die, Roxas. Me, you, the people, those guards, the City of Paper. Maybe Tia Dalma. Eventually, I will die. And so will you."

"Don't die so _soon_," the boy amended desperately. "Don't _leave_."

Axel nuzzled the pale neck. "So long as I have breath in me, I won't leave you, Roxas. I can't stop the future, but I can tell you something about it: neither you nor I have one. Pasts, maybe. I know you do. I have few memories. But we don't have futures. All we have is here and now and what we make between each other will be the memories I carry with me to my dying day. Today and every today hereafter we'll be together and I'll love you until I die. It's all I have Roxas. Do you still want me?"

"Yes..."

"Then no more tears. Our lives are what we make them until we die. No more regrets about time. No more sorrow."

"No more," Roxas sighed. "I'll try. But Axel—"

Snarling, Axel interrupted him with a long, hard kiss.

***

Despite his promise Roxas was subdued during their runs that evening and the following. What heedlessness had taught him about risk and bravery, helplessness reduced to mere shadows of effort. In contrast, their couplings were passionate during the dark day-night of the cell, the blond insatiable until exhaustion won out.

It made everything very hard to forget.

Axel made it one week before his temper won out, no longer able to watch his lover suffer alone.

***

Rain had fallen hard that night as they worked, guttering the lamps relentlessly while the Paperwrights perfected their designs. Flames atop the fire shell burned half-heartedly, their fuel diluted by the watery onslaught. The Depths had burned out and the lamps were cold by midnight, and Axel had no time to relight them.

The Nihilia had realized their advantage in this weather and came in numbers from multiple sides, forcing Roxas out of his stupor. Returning to old defensive rote, the boy cut them down mercilessly, blades gleaming faint patterns in meager firelight, the black shroud enveloping him in flat-toned relief and protecting him fully from the renewed self-destruction attack. The unpredictable, lethal black slugs kept the guards at bay and rain kept the fire-archers useless, but Axel had not forgotten his epiphany.

After all, Roxas had already seen him naked.

Lighting himself on fire was a simple thing. Flames and fireflies were the closest things his physical shape had to his powerful origins. Surrounding himself in his own sort of shroud was not only safe but also a step closer to his true nature. He'd done it before, but never for a night as a part of defense. Taking a brief respite to remove all his clothing but an old blood-stained shirt torn in many places, he stood on a secluded ledge of the Watch Tower and ignited twin fires in his palms, watching small fireflies rise from the light. In seconds he had it up his arms, over his shoulders and head, running circuits over his chest and hips and separating for his legs. The rain hissed and turned to white wisps where it struck him.

Hands pressed to his chest, he felt about for the shirt and was surprised to find neither its texture nor the shape of his temporal form.

"Did it work?"

Axel looked up and found Roxas looking up at him from their usual spot on the Tower.

"Do you need help?" Axel asked, cracking his shoulders experimentally.

"Yes. How do you feel?"

Axel laughed. "Giddy! I've done this a couple of times, but never for fighting!"

His lover only gave him a skeptical appraisal. "Just be careful."

"Why?"

"We're gemini of a sort, right? For the sorcerer? So our power will be similar, and when I use the shroud there's a chance I'll lose myself in it and … not come back. So don't forget yourself, all right?"

Twisting his lips, Axels scowled down at him. "You might have told me about the risks to you sooner, you know!"

"No cause. The responsibility is not anyone's but mine. Get down here already!"

"Get your damned cloak back on!" Axel shouted back over the downpour, but headed in the direction of the bristle along his fire-covered skin… if he even still had skin.

_Yes, I still have skin,_ he told himself in light of Roxas's warning. _I just can't rely on its senses, like when I wore gloves in the beginning._

This comparison did not bode well for the shirt.

The shadows had nearly taken a portion of the wall when they got there, exploding like bombs on sight and sending gobbets of slugs down on the arriving guardians. Roxas was muddled lump of darkness and oblivious to this, but Axel felt brief, searing pain as the slugs struck him in four or five places and were incinerated on contact. Chakram came spinning eagerly to his open palms and instead of weapons felt like natural parts of his arms and hands, even as they sliced hotly through the rainwater, leaving a thin tail of mist like shooting stars.

The Nihilia did not seem so oblivious to his fire as they did that terrible night before the fire shell had been erected. Axel took a sick pleasure in their whispery screams as he laid into them with fireballs and searing, flame-formed chakram. His body lit the area like a solitary beam of sunlight, his partner a flitting shadow of darkness all around him, sneaking about the Shadows' outer edges and meeting Axel in the middle to polish the force off before they fled to defend another portion of the Wall.

While they ran, Axel sent fireflies to all the lamps he could think of. Even without fuel the little bobbing lights could ward away shadow on their own for a time, if their numbers were strong enough. Axel's new shape lent him more than enough energy.

The blaze around his body did not come without a price. In the twilight before dawn, Roxas pinned him to someone's roof, the sharp tips of the keyblades digging into Axel's shoulders. He came out of his burning reverie to infinite cold and wet, a muted and graying sky behind Roxas's angry visage.

"I told you to be careful!" The boy snapped.

Axel thought he had been. The fire was gone from his body now completely, and his shirt was in cinders all over the City. So much for that. He gripped the blades embedded in his shoulders. "You poked me in the shoulders when we first met, too." He smirked. Roxas gave the blades angry twists, drawing just a little blood before the twin weapons vanished.

"Don't fuck around!" The boy snapped, striding away. "Put your damned clothes back on!"

Reprimanded, Axel returned to his stash on the Tower and dressed again, minus one very dirty, torn shirt, his one victory the red tinge Roxas's face had taken when he'd mentioned their first meeting.

***

"I forgot to ask you," Axel murmured, pulling his fingers through sweaty blond hair in the darkness of their cell. He was on his back, Roxas gasping where he'd fallen on Axel's chest.

"What?" Roxas replied sleepily, snuggling closer.

"In your dream…"

"Axel…" The blond shifted, voice curling into the beginnings of a snarl. "Don't."

Working his fingers along the blond scalp, Axel cheerfully ignored the warning. "It's only fair. You got to be on top this time."

"It's a shared responsibility!" Roxas shot back. "Stay off the dreams!"

"No," Axel replied, cheerful energy lagging as sleep loomed over him. "I want to know something."

"You're like a little kid, you know that?"

"Sorry," Axel said quietly. "But when you told me about my death, you never said what happened to you."

On top of him, Roxas froze. Axel paused his ministrations along the base of the boy's skull.

"Roxas?"

"I don't… know." He didn't sound angry as he said it, but sad. "I always wake up screaming. I don't know what happens to me."

With a grunt of acceptance, Axel settled back into the gentle massage of his lover's scalp and kept quiet conversation on safer topics until he fell asleep.

Once certain the redhead was out, Roxas slipped free of him and lay on the pallet beside him, staring up into the darkness for a very long time.

***

With the exception of rainy nights, the next few months drifted by with relative regularity. Axel learned he could go without being a walking torch, be hit by a slug, and still ignite in time to destroy the thing and prevent damage to himself or his clothes. Roxas seemed to like things better this way, though Axel pointed out the shroud of darkness was not all that different. Smirking, the blond had cloaked himself anyway. "I'm not the one who gets a power trip and forgets himself until dawn, am I?"

Axel got him back for that in bed.

A victory they shared in Axel's protective fire-skin was the effect it had on the guards. The demon ability endeared Axel further to no one, and according to Roxas, smirking did not help either. That seemed to be the only thing that translated through the fire – his nudity was not exposed until he dropped the fire-skin. The replacement guard captain was the only one not impressed in any way. A new addition to the night shift, Helga Sinclair was even-tempered and dry-humored, telling Axel not to burn the city down with his new shape before she marched away.

Roxas and Axel grew equally fond of her over the next months, finding she treated them consistently with begrudging respect – they had their duties and she had hers. It was not this that won them over, but her happening by when the guards elected to awaken them with stones again one evening. A low threat to their own pleasures was enough to stop the harassment.

After teaming up with her to stop a Nihilia uprising near the Wall one night, Roxas asked her why she'd stopped the guards that day. Beneath a curl of blond hair, she chagrined. "Let's just say I don't tangle with the supernatural."

Axel certainly did. Roxas found Axel was just as capable of lighting the lamps with fireflies from a distance as he was lighting them individually. Axel discovered that both of them could be covered in the shroud, still sense the Nihilia, and make good damn use of one of many dark, abandoned alleys in the city, even once daring to cross the wall and make love under the starlight on the broad expanse of waste surrounding the city.

They did not see Tia Dalma again for some time, but Captain Sinclair brought a sense of purpose to the night guard that even Axel had not seen. In mere weeks she'd transformed the aimless jumble of empowered monkeys into a back up team for the mysterious city guardians. This, too, she credited to a healthy fear of the supernatural. Axel was glad for the organized help during attacks, but was not oblivious to Roxas's apprehension. His friend and lover had foreseen the Captain's arrival as well. Axel squashed the thoughts of death this provoked – there was no sense in being debilitated by the inevitable, and no point in observing their progress toward it. Only the array of bruises he left on Roxas's skin while they lay abed testified to the true strength of his resolve and to that of his desire to run far, far away.

Avoiding all talk of dreams, Roxas only embraced him harder in return, leaving teeth marks on Axel's skin that stung the next night as they ran the City.

***

Tia Dalma had been merciful, telling them so little about themselves.

_If she even knew anything_, Axel thought, sliding down the aqueduct and lighting bowls on the way down to the depths. The night above was a broad dome of glimmering, pale stars, blotted by few dusty clouds on the far horizon. Even with their fates decided, Roxas still woke screaming to nightmares. In the dark, windowless room of their cell the boy had huddled close against Axel's chest, hissing desires to run away, to leave and be free, rocking like a madman.

Axel had always known he could never leave Paper. The teasing stars and moon knew it too, providing mockery as they did sustenance.

Now more than ever, he wanted to try.

_That would be a sorry sight._ Axel sighed. One of Paper's finer traits was its safety; unless you were a sorcerer equal to the spells protecting the city, you couldn't do so much as common housebreaking. He wouldn't have any extra clothing to protect him from the sun. _I don't have a cloak like the guards do; I'd have to hide under Roxas's shroud by day and carry him and defend us by night. _

They could pull it off, somehow, and he knew it. He brought it up one evening, dressing and waiting for the guards. The boy shuddered.

"I thought you knew about that."

"About what?"

Axel heard Roxas's wry smile in his reply. "About Paper. How the sorcerer protects it from raids and gypsies and things. It's an experiment."

"So? We can leave, right?"

"No. No one leaves Paper."

"Why not?"

Roxas shrugged. "Tia Dalma told me. That first time I was injured, she asked after my dreams and I told her – everything. Then I asked her if you and I shouldn't just leave. She told me that leaving isn't possible."

_So she isn't all that merciful._ Axel leaned against the wall near the door. "Why not? We cross the Wall all the time."

"'Tis not de Wall dat lead you out from de city," a voice said curtly from the other side of the door, dark eyes set in a rich dark face peering through the bars set at the top. "I can only help ye once after dis. I tell ye once, Roxas, and now I tell ye, Axel. Ye cannot leave de city."

"Why not?" Axel hissed. "We're stronger than the guards! All we have to do is take the gatehouse and open it and we're free!"

"Ye cannot leave because ye were created to protect de city. Just as de people ye protect were created to live in de city."

Axel opened his mouth several times, only managing stunned silence and weak, croaky protests. Roxas found words faster. "You're saying goodbye. Does that mean the sorcerer didn't create you?"

"Aye. I came to see his work. De apprentice is close and," a smirk crept into her voice. "'E would not be pleased to find de likes of me here."

Finding words at last, Axel snapped, "What were you doing here, then?"

"I came to see if de disappearances in my home were caused by de sorcerer responsible here." She nodded at Roxas. "His blood is not de same, so I have to continue searching."

"If you're leaving, take us with you!" Axel said.

"I already told ye, ye were created to protect de city. You cannot leave; ye weren't created to."

Roxas bit his lip, the way he did when working his thoughts around a problem. "We live and we die," he said slowly. "The way people do in books. How are we different?"

"De sorcerer made you, and restricted you. Dat make you different from me, or my people. We weren't created by someone who walked among us like your sorcerer did."

"So if we were only created to exist here," Axel said slowly, "then we were also created to _not_ exist… out there?"

"Yes."

The redhead looked to his lover and found Roxas had averted his gaze. "You knew!"

Shrugging, Roxas kept his gaze to the floor. "I told you what I knew. We can't leave Paper."

"No, we don't _exist_ outside of Paper! You knew that!"

Blue eyes finally met Axel's gaze. "It amounts to the same thing! We live, we love, we die. All here, in the damned City."

Snarling, Axel rounded on the door. "Anyway, what appre—"

"_I will see the two of ye once more, when de apprentice nears."_

He faltered. The witch was gone; the door open to their escort outside, but her voice was fresh in his ears. Again he looked to his companion. "Roxas—"

Head down and face shadowed by his hair, the boy marched toward the door, voice hollow. "Come on. We have work to do."

Axel followed, feeling suddenly heavy and sluggish as though he hadn't slept at all.


	6. Truth and Promises

A/N: Officially, this is the second-to-last chapter. The rating comes into play again here. D Sorry if the double-post is troublesome. Thanks again to all of my wonderful reviewers - you guys make fanfic worth writing, whatever my fanfic is worth. XD Always, sorry for any OOC or that 'rushed' feeling. It was a mistake, giving myself permission in the beginning to handle this story that way.

Disclaimer: This _DOES_ get tiresome! All characters herein belong in some way to Square-Enix and/or Disney. Except a few of the guards. Not that I want them. Take them. They throw stones at sleeping lovers. TAKE THEM AWAAAAAAYYYY!

* * *

It did not rain that night. Torrents of wind screamed across the city, finding voice in hollows and holes and eaves as Axel and Roxas ran the city. Unlike the rain, the wind was no match for his fire most of the time, unless swinging lamps spilled enough fluid to extinguish early in the evening. One of these hung outside the gatehouse, the damned gatehouse, and Axel was forced to ask for more lighting fluid. Keeping him company in the blustery minutes was Captain Sinclair, the only guard with any respect for the work of the Creatures of Darkness and Light. After Tia Dalma's visit, Roxas's failure to tell him important things and his own troubled identity, Axel was in no mood for chitchat. Sinclair wasn't the type either, but couldn't let his foul mood go unnoticed.

"What's eating you?"

Axel snorted and stared at a spot on the wall, ignoring the militaristic female to his left.

"Not getting any?"

His temper flared and he rounded on her, cheeks heating. "That's not it!"

She studied him for a moment and shrugged. "It's none of my business, but it shouldn't get in the way of your work, got it?"

"And what if there was no meaning to our work, no point in any of it?"

"Of course there's a point. There are lives here to be saved, aren't there?"

"Lives that don't exist anywhere but here," Axel muttered sourly. "Insignificant."

She blinked at him, expression blank in surprise. "Well of course not. It's not like you're the gods' gift to the living world, either."

Axel shook his head as the guard returned, refilling the lamp outside the door. "It's harder when you know you're going to die soon."

She sighed. "No one knows when they're going to die. Quit moping already. You've got him, don't you loverboy?" she said, walking back into the gatehouse. Axel followed long enough to light the lamp before retreating into the mottled darkness under the fire shell.

For having so little time remaining that even Tia Dalma had left, he didn't take advantage of it. Still angry with Roxas he meandered the city slowly, looking for lamps extinguished by the wind. There were not many and his mood had not improved before the guards came to collect him.

Neither had Roxas's. As soon as they reached the cell, the boy settled himself on the far edge of their shared bed and bundled tight in a blanket. Too angry to care, Axel flopped down on the bare half of the paired pallets and balled up in his own blanket, eyes closed and mind racing. The bed was long uncomfortable in any position when sleep finally began to creep over him and interrupted by Roxas's panicked, pained cries as he shook himself back into the waking world.

_Dammit, _Axel thought tiredly, rolling over to face Roxas where he sat, panting and sweating, in the bed next to him. Resting one long-fingered hand on his lover's thigh, Axel found the boy's eyes. "Come here."

"Forgiven me, have you?" Roxas rasped, voice hoarse and strained.

"I love you too much to waste time being petty now," Axel sighed. "Really. Come here. You sleep better when I hold you, don't you?"

For long minutes, Roxas sat where he was, staring down at the redhead. At long last he let out a very deep sigh and lay down next to him, face tucked into Axel's chest and arms wrapped around the redhead's slim waist. Axel pulled both blankets over them, tucking them in around the edges. Then he put his arms around Roxas, holding him close and playing with the nap of the hair at the back of the boy's neck.

"You're really not angry with me?"

Axel sighed. "You were right. It amounts to the same thing."

"The details make a pretty big difference," the blond admitted.

"Yeah, and they could march us out to meet the sorcerer tomorrow. I don't care about details anymore. I bet you don't either."

"No. And I haven't for a long time."

Finding the boy's exposed ear, Axel rubbed the upper curve of flesh gently between his fingers, earning a very satisfied sigh from the appendage's owner. "There is one thing I have to ask you, though," Axel mused quietly after a few minutes of comfortable silence.

"What?" Roxas purred.

"Why did you work so hard to keep things from me that hurt you? The nightmares, knowing I'm going to die, that we don't exist outside this place… Why?"

"Honestly?"

"I'll never want you to lie, Roxas."

Roxas sighed and pulled away to look Axel straight in the eye. "I was afraid it would hurt you, and that the pain would push you away from me, make you afraid."

"I'm not sure I understand…"

"Of course not. You don't see yourself from my eyes. I came here because of the nightmares and learned a bit later what was going to happen to us. You've always known me like this. But you didn't have that knowledge and you were so… When we started talking and sharing things you'd get all excited and happy because I could tell you about the world, teach you things, and you could teach me what you learned. I couldn't just outright tell you 'Oh, by the way, don't get too excited – you're going to die,' and watch you become how I felt inside – hollow but for the purpose we were given when we were created. And I…"

When he didn't continue, Axel tried to prompt him. "You what?"

"I didn't want you to like me out of a sense of mortality, either."

"Is that why you like me?"

Roxas shook his head. "I've given that a lot of thought, and it's not. If you think about it, you'll see it too."

"Now that I'm looking for it, I will."

"Don't be a pessimist! We've known each other probably a year now, maybe longer or shorter – it never occurred to me to keep track. And I don't think I'd feel like I've known you all my life if I only became friends with you because I didn't want to die alone."

Axel slid a hand up the boy's waist. "And in bed?"

"I'd have done it a lot sooner if I'd meant to be selfish about it," Roxas smirked, his own hands roaming beneath the blankets. "You're not exactly hard to look at."

Sliding a leg gently between Roxas's thighs, he shifted meaningfully against the hardening heat there. "Are you so sure about that?"

"That's a big stretch for a small pun," Roxas hissed, face flushed in the grey-indigo of night vision.

"My pun's not small, but you _are _going to have to stretch."

"We'll see who's stretching for whom in the end," Roxas shot back, rolling on top of Axel and straddling his hips. The blankets went with him and fell from his shoulders to Axel's legs, followed shortly by shirts and pants and undergarments.

***

True to her word, Tia Dalma came once more, bearing news.

The guards were abuzz at night now, excited by the new talk of the outside world and mysteries of sorcerers and magic and other Cities. During the day had come a messenger from a faraway place no two people could identically pronounce the name of. Axel suspected the sorcerer could have worked his tongue around the jumble of accent and tumble of letters; the messenger was the old bastard's indirect doing.

The witch had shown up in their cell after a long night of intermittent attacks and sneaking about the City looking for places to bundle under the dark shroud for some fun. They had little success in this and were eager to claim the privacy of their cell when they found Tia waiting for them, expression dark.

Word was, the messenger had come with news of a sorcerer on his way, crossing what was called the Expanse to his master's creation, the City of Paper, to begin setting protections around it. In this missive was also an apology for the delayed departure and the sincere hope that the temporary measures left behind by his master had held through for them.

_Of course we did!_ Axel snarled mentally, but flinched when he remembered the fire shell the Paperwrights had crafted, and the little witch before them now that had saved both their lives.

_For what?_

The news ruined what little chance Axel had of salvaging their dark daytime. After Tia left, he spent the early morning lying on the pallet while Roxas paced the room. Axel counted the footsteps while his lover muttered darkly and swore under his breath.

"I doubt the Paperwrights are happy," Axel said when Roxas's fretting silence and pacing got to him at last. "They don't need those new lamps anymore."

"It won't be long after we die that they won't be needed at all!" Roxas snapped, returning to wearing the paper floor bricks down with his pacing.

Axel sat up. "We?"

"No! You."

"You said 'we.'"

The boy bristled. "No I didn't."

Axel stood, smoldering fireflies lighting around his shoulders and taking to lilting about the room. Grabbing thin shoulders, Axel pushed Roxas against the wall. "You did. You said we."

"Would you listen to me? I said 'you!'"

Studying his face intently, Axel took the boy's pale wrists and pinned them to the wall next to Roxas's ears. "You're lying, Roxas."

In reply, the blond twisted to try and escape. Conviction lent Axel the energy to keep hold on him.

"What happens to you the day I die, Roxas?"

"I told you, I don't know!"

Meeting the blue eyes with green, Axel searched for the lie and found nothing. "What about the day after?"

Roxas blinked his surprise. Axel pressed on. "Or the day after, or the day after that? What happens to you when we're obsolete and I'm destroyed?"

After a long silence, Roxas bit his lip and slumped against the wall, held up only by Axel's fists around his forearms. When he found Axel's eyes again, the weary sadness was gone, replaced by finality and resolve. "You must swear one thing by your life and mine when I tell you this, Axel. Swear that when the day comes for you to die, you'll take me with you."

Axel scowled. "You want me to… kill you?"

Roxas nodded. "Swear that you will."

"_Why_? If one of us can live—" Axel stopped, interrupted by his lover's dry, coarse laugh.

"Living is not something I'll be doing when you die, Axel. Swear by our lives and love that you'll take me with you when you die that day."

Other than the Nihilia and those it created, Axel had never harmed anyone. All he had memory of was the City of Paper and defending it by night, a prisoner by day. It made sense now that the people had no regard for him or for Roxas – they may have always felt they were temporary measures, that another sorcerer would come along and coddle them in their parchment cradle, safe from all harm. Oblivious.

A cold jolt zapped his belly. Was oblivion outside or inside the Wall of Paper?

Could he leave Roxas behind in that? Could he take that life he so treasured, feel it snuffed out before he left the world, hear it scream from within ragged tumbles of his own bright fire? The long fingered hands that cupped the boy's pale face trembled, then blurred as hot tears slid down his face. He held Roxas's face as he rode out the sobs in sorrow and a strange, vague sense of detachment from time. When the room was silent again but for the ringing in his ears, Axel met Roxas's eyes again, reflecting their resolution and weary resignation.

_We weren't created to exist outside of Paper._

"I never put much stock in fate anyway," he croaked at last. "That being, I don't know when I'll see you again when this life is over, so I'm taking you with me."

With a look of deep-seated relief, Roxas reached for him, clinging to him tightly and burying his face in Axel's chest. Axel held him while he cried softly, rubbing the boy's back and murmuring soothing nonsense into tousled blond hair, feeling oddly at peace and thinking himself morbid for it. But as Roxas settled down and found his eyes again, Axel let the judgment go, finding the same tranquility in his lover's blue eyes. It was still there, under the mischief that crept in over Roxas's pale features.

"I suppose you want to know what would have happened to me?"

Axel grinned. "You did say you'd tell me."

"I did." Snuggling closer, Roxas closed his eyes. "The sorcerer's apprentice comes at dawn and we are summoned to him. After the sun comes up and you die, the apprentice appraises me, his master's creation, and cancels my destruction, taking me instead to his residence for experiments."

"Exp…eriments." Axel said, tasting the word with dry disbelief. "Are you serious."

Roxas nodded. "His master didn't live to pass on the art of beings like us, so he thinks, as a full-fledged sorcerer, he can figure out how to… make things like us if he…" The boy shuddered against Axel's arms, giving the redhead chills of his own. "If he takes me apart."

"You didn't see that part, did you?"

"I get as far as a large room with a table in the middle, lined with straps. I'm laid on it and restrained. After that there's a lot of pain, and a lot of screaming. Then I wake up."

Axel shuddered again, tightening his arms around Roxas's warm, breathing form. "I am definitely taking you with me. Did you actually doubt that I would, after hearing that?"

Against Axel's chest, the boy flushed red. "I didn't know what it would take to convince you to kill me, Axel. I'm not so sure I could kill you."

"Everything would have been the other way around from the beginning, I think, if that was how it was supposed to be."

"I thought we were changing fate?" Roxas jibed.

"Maybe it's our fate to change fate?"

Shaking his head, the blond burrowed into the corner of Axel's shoulder and kissed the rise of the man's neck. "Fuck fate," he hissed. "Tricky bitch."

Axel smirked and shifted, hands finding familiar planes of muscle under Roxas's shirt. "Not fate, Roxas, me. Fuck me."

The blond bit him hard for that before pulling off his shirt and bringing their lips together.

***

In retrospect, pulling his hands through Roxas's sweat-dampened hair, Axel reflected that the younger man seemed to work harder in bed than he ever did along the wall. He found he didn't mind who lay on top of whom, so long as it was Roxas he laid with, and his lover had taken full advantage of this leniency on more than one occasion, tonight a prime example. Now with the blond snoozing lightly where he'd fallen against Axel's chest, their bodies warm and sated and fitted together like puzzle pieces beneath the blankets, Axel mused over the pale, sleeping features of his friend-turned-lover. It had always struck him how Roxas could be so stoic and rigid in accepting his fate, a peerless warrior and one readily rising to occasion in battle. Never once had Axel seen him hesitate to swing, complain about another attack, become sluggish in his resolve.

It was a sharp contrast to his passion in bed.

Axel had first thought it a mix of leisure occupation and lust, but Roxas's ardor never burned low. Rubbing a coloring love-bite on his neck, Axel studied the boy's souring features. _A nightmare. Won't be long now._

If Axel was his refuge, he was happy to oblige. But Roxas never spoke more than he had to about anything that troubled him, and any misery or reluctance to walk this dark path laid by fate was only visible when his guard was completely down, evidenced in bruises and sore bits of Axel's flesh caught between his teeth.

The only thing Roxas accepted was his inability to change anything about his situation.

_That doesn't mean he hates it any less,_ Axel thought, stretching long legs and finding himself a bit sore in certain areas. He stroked the tousled hair, waiting out the nightmare that had begun to make Roxas's muscles jerk in places. _No matter how much we talk, we can't do a damned thing in the end but choose our ends before they're chosen for us. And if the only time we can really face that is here, I can weather a few bruises. But is he really finding release, or is this just another damned exercise in futility, like the lamps the Paperwrights are making?_

Roxas jerked hard against him then, sweating and gasping as he lurched from the bed and took in his surroundings with wild eyes. Catching the boy by his trembling wrists, Axel pulled him gently close and held him tight for a little while. No matter how strong his arms were around the smaller man's body, Axel could never stop its trembling, never hold him tight enough to wrench him from the grasp of pain and precognition. He used his palms instead, working the taut muscles along the familiar stretch of back until his companion quieted and sank deep into his embrace, like a man giving to the undertow and allowing himself to drown.

"What is it?"

"A new one," Roxas rasped, hands clenched into fists near Axel's shoulders.

Axel groaned. "Great, another Seeing dream?"

"I don't know…" he replied quietly. "I know that it was a dream, that it was terrifying and felt like oblivion, eternity. Everything was dark. That's it. Just me, blackness, and every fear and every perversion of desire."

"Desire?"

"More time, a quiet life. They were there all right, an eternity of wandering that… blackness… and…"

Axel shook his head. "I understand."

"Do you?"

"As well as I can," Axel helped him sit up so he could see Roxas's eyes, purest gemstone cerulean turned to pale grey-blue chalk in the darkness of night vision. With a finger he traced the shape of those eyes, tarnished by longing and futility and waiting. Closing his lids, Roxas leaned toward Axel's hand, savoring the touch, the pain on his face splintered by true peace. Axel sat closer then, knees at either side of Roxas's bent legs, and closed his eyes, fingers caressing the many shapes and curves of Roxas's pale face that he'd seen countless times in countless ways—

_screaming crying laughing stern blank confused happy pleasured tired angry_

—and memorizing its cut and mold with his fingertips, massaging his temples in gentle spirals, rubbing the upper curve of his ears and trailing touches lightly down his jaw, tipping his head back and pulling light caresses back from the soft part of his throat back over his chin. He curved his fingers like wings over the low part of Roxas's pale cheeks and used his thumbs to trace the slight indentation beneath his lower lip and then its own soft swell around the line of his sweet mouth, imagining the blond's tongue wrapped slick around his own as he moved up from the seam of his lips to the upper lip. From there he stroked the slight valley leading to the rise of his nose. He was halfway there when Roxas made a low nose in his throat. Reverie broken, Axel opened his eyes a little to see what was wrong.

Eyes still closed, Roxas was leaning very close to him, face in a full flush and breath a little heavy. Axel took the younger man's chin between his fingers and gave a low command. "Open your eyes, Roxas."

Obediently, twin, lusterless blue eyes slid open, the hurt and pain there pale beneath a new spark Axel also knew very well. It was all the acknowledgement he needed and he shifted his knees, bracing Roxas's back with one palm and with the other taking the boy's hand. As in a dance, he dipped his lover until his hair was a muted splash of yellow ochre across the blanket at the foot of the bed. Axel's hands were adrift now, ranging far and near over the spread of his lover's body before him. He slid one palm down the inside of Roxas's thigh, brushing briefly the heat where leg met pelvis.

"Promise me something, Roxas."

This was met with half-realized inquiry, the blue eyes expressing an indecisive blend of curiosity and lust.

"No matter how pointless things might seem later, no matter how in vain or futile, promise you'll always have the will to make love to me."

"The… will?"

Axel nodded, cupping his hands around Roxas's arousal and sliding his palms up from there, over his belly, up the sides of his torso and over his chest, resting finally on the pallet at either side of Roxas's jaw. Their faces were suddenly close, and Roxas's breath caught in his chest as Axel whispered his clarification.

"Don't give up on us, don't ever lose hope here." He took Roxas's face between his hands. "We've been dealt a pretty shitty hand, beloved, but we have an ace, do you know that?"

"You mean killing ourselves before they can destroy and tear us apart?" Roxas whispered dryly.

"Nope. We can fold whenever, in terms of the game. No – our ace is this," he said, grasping Roxas's nearest hand. "No one dealt us this card, and no one decides the fate of our hearts. I'm asking you to never lose sight of _that_ Roxas. Promise me you'll never forget the one thing we decided for ourselves – for the better."

He waited then, for an answer, thumb rubbing along the ridge of the boy's knuckles, waiting for the blank look of turning thought to change… into _anything_ but the rigid tension swirling about them.

Then, he smiled.

It was _nothing_ like the wry glimpses of laughter during conversation or a mischievous grin while they tumbled naked and fought playfully for dominance. Instead it was sweet and simple, neither large to overwhelm the darkness or small and almost lost in pain. There _was_ no darkness in his face now, no suffering underneath it in his eyes. Quiet like the choir at the temple to ward away bad spirits, as dark as deepest depths of the Demon of Light's brightest fires, it brightened the darkness they shared to warm intimacy, heating all the cold places in Axel's soul to merry blazes.

It was gone in seconds, leaving in its wake a vague after-image. Roxas was still smiling peacefully up at him, though the full force of his reaction was lost. The redhead almost didn't have the heart left to ask; he'd bartered the last of it the kid didn't have for that one pure display of happiness – real happiness.

"Do you promise?" He found he was grinning as he asked, and the question only brought back the familiar grin Roxas wore when they got frisky.

"I do!" Roxas said, chuckling as though he couldn't really help it, free hand finding its way between Axel's thighs, teasing the hardness there with practiced motions. "And you?"

"What?"

"Aren't you going to promise me?"

Axel growled playfully and leaned in fast, his aim the boy's ear and his teeth bared. "Of course! But you can't trust anything I say at the moment," he pointed out.

Roxas blinked, a shadow of wariness crossing his pale, flushed face. "Why not?"

Axel gave his hips a gentle thrust against Roxas's probing fingers. "At the moment you've got the best hand in the game," he pointed out.

"Well, if you wanted me to let go, you should have just…"

"No no no no no, don't do that!"

Roxas smirked. "Besides," he said as Axel kissed the corner of his mouth, "it takes more than a warm hand around your cock to get you to jump off a cliff anyway."

"Damn straight it does, but your hand is worth a lot more than any person's complete set."

Roxas huffed. "And you're not worth anything flattened by your own momentum at the bottom of a gorge."

"Meaning…?"

"Oh there's lots of ways to say it," Roxas said, tilting his head away to expose his neck as Axel nibbled down from the base of his ear.

"And the best way?"

Roxas grinned, snared a fistful of his lover's hair and pulled him over his face until they were nose to nose.

"How about shut up and fuck me?"

"That works," Axel smirked. "You'll want to find something else to hang on to, though."

Snarling, Roxas gave him a final, rough squeeze and moved his hand to rest against Axel's upper arm. "Won't be your hips, that's for sure."

"What's that mean?"

"It means you're skinny!" Roxas laughed, sliding a leg along the inset of Axel's narrow waist and what little he had for hips. "All bones!"

The laughter in the younger man's voice was unmistakable, like a pane of glass standing between them had been shattered, leaving nothing to filter Roxas's words – or Axel's own. The redhead bit one of Roxas's hard nipples. "Hey! I've a bit of skin on those bones, thank you!"

"Oh I suppose," Roxas finished as a compromise, more and more distracted by Axel's caresses and explorations. "But it's a bit of a---_Oh_!"

Axel smirked, long fingers wrapped around Roxas's own hard length. "You were saying?"

"R-right…." Roxas panted, eyes defiant. "Put your mouth to better use already."

"You wish," Axel said smugly, watching pleasure war with banter in his companion's eyes while he worked his fingers and palm against the blond's heat, drinking in the sight of pleasure winning the battle. Words began to fade, and Roxas's thighs spread out to either side, knees wide around Axel's body.

_He's mine_, Axel thought abruptly, feeling a sense of pride. _And I'm his. And this is no one's game but our own – No one designed us to be this way, no one planned our friendship or our love. We spend a lot of time trying to cheat fate but… maybe we already have. We weren't created to matter as people, but here we are, hearts and bodies open to each other. Home._

If that was what it was, this he embraced as readily as he did Roxas, tasting satisfaction on his lover's tongue and smelling his own completion along Roxas's skin. Here, in his arms, he was whole, a lover and a friend, accepted and human.

As always, he lost himself in Roxas's body. The walls and ceiling and floor fell away, responsibility forgotten and the hole in the door exposing them to prying eyes lost in the darkness. Roxas's arms were around him, his voice in his ears and his body before him, bare and warm and smooth.

"Axel…" that voice gasped, reaching him from beyond pleasured jerks of his thighs, protective reflexes fought by the need for pleasure as Axel worked his fingers against more intimate muscles. "Are you all right? You're…ah… quieter than usual."

Axel removed his fingers and pressed, slow and cautious, inside. He hardly needed to work him open first any more, after all their practice screwing around the city and the cell. Leaning over Roxas, he brushed the soft strands of blackness-darkened hair from his eyes, unable to stop smiling. "I'm fine," he replied. "Are you okay?"

He nodded.

"Roxas…"

The younger man caught Axel's lips with his own, moaning as Axel's body shifted within him. Axel swallowed these low groans greedily, readjusting the grip of his hands and gently beginning to thrust inside the heat surrounding him. Roxas clutched his arms, nails leaving arches of thin indentation in Axel's biceps. The redhead claimed Roxas's mouth mid-grunt again and slid his hands up from his torso to the younger man's arms and slid the appendages up over his blond head, crossing them at the wrists and holding them in place with one hand and pulling his tongue along an exposed section of the boy's pale throat, feeling the low buzz of the moan it coaxed from him before pulling away. He readjusted the boy's knees on his shoulders and stilled his hips, eyes all over his lover as Roxas's body told him not to stop.

Ready to please, he lowered himself over Roxas's panting torso and renewed his efforts, swinging his hips harder and harder as his body grew more and more accustomed to the sweeping waves of pleasure that crashed in over his senses. Roxas's arms were around him again, tight around his shoulders, his voice filling Axel's ears as he rode him, shifting his approach just a little until he heard _that_ pitch in his voice, the epitome of all the sounds Axel could coax from him.

It always made his world fall away and his mind spin, barely able to feel Roxas's body, hot and damp, beneath and around his own as he clutched him close, ecstasy bursting hot and blissful from him.

The physical world he forgot first always came back first, in dim walls and hard lines. The bed, and the blankets second, leaving the warm softness of Roxas's body for the last. It was always last at times like this; his fuddled mind couldn't discern where his own body ended and where his lover's began. He was still trying to sort it all out when he had them wrapped tight in blankets and snuggled in close, Roxas's face peaceful in sleep.

_Always first to crash,_ Axel mused after a while, playing idly with a strand of blond hair while his body cooled down toward sleep. He was justifiably surprised when Roxas sleepily opened his eyes and stabbed a pale finger into Axel's chest, just above his heart.

"Never forget, either," he whispered sleepily, "you're _mine_."

Low in his throat, Axel chuckled softly. "So long as you never forget who belongs to _me_."

The boy fell asleep with a laughing smile on his lips. Axel took the sight with him into the land of dreams as he drifted off to sleep.

Later he would recall their coupling that night as average for them, neither awkward and halfassed like some of their times in bed nor mind-blowing and inextricably unifying like a handful of their romps. No matter how things panned out, Axel always found himself hungry for the next time they laid together, never quite sated. From this vantage, an average night of lovemaking was just as good as any in terms of finality.


	7. Dawn

A/N: It certainly took me long enough, didn't it? For a while, I lost the thread entirely. Then life, as per usual, got in the way. To cut it all very short and pass all the angst and self-pity and misery of the past weeks, I'll say this: enough is enough, where is the final chapter of that damned thing?! XD

This is officially the first fanfiction I have ever, truly, finished. And when I began it I made a promise to myself that if I finished it, I would get to post the playlist of music that originally inspired this (i was listening to random of all songs on my ipod and these were the ones that stood out). Silly, huh? Nevertheless, a promise is a promise and my psyche and muse both need the indulgence. Kindly ignore it if it pleases you to do so. (I hope I can post a playlist in an A/N, the rules are quite different here than they are on DeviantArt.)

_Whispers in the Dark_ by Skillet  
_Imaginary_ by Evanescence  
_Wrapped in Your Arms_ by Fireflight  
_Driving With the Top Down_ by Ramin Djawadi (from the Iron Man soundtrack)  
_Carnival of Rust_ by Poets of the Fall  
_Leave Out All the Rest_ by Linkin Park  
_Only the Strong_ by Flaw (this might in truth be a Nine Inch Nails song, my iTunes has never been clear about this)  
_Ready and Waiting to Fall_ by Mae  
_La Journée Est Finie_ from Les Misérables: The French Concept Album (the only place to find this is on , I warn you)  
_Shall Never Surrender_ by Jason "Shyboy" Arnold of Hyonogaja (from the Devil May Cry 4 Special Original Soundtrack - this song is awesome, though tricky to find)  
_Photograph_ by 12 Stones  
_The Hand That Feeds_ by Nine Inch Nails

I am sorry, again, for OOC, a sense of being rushed, or a short chapter. And also for run-on sentences and over-description, the battle against these is ongoing. I'm a bit more content with this as it is now than I was with it when I posted Chapter 6. I hope it leaves you well.

Whether it comes as a relief or a disappointment, I must say that I won't be working on anything new at least until this summer. I am moving! There is a convention! I have to get a new job before I have to apply at my current position for a fireproof uniform because mine is not withstanding the temperatures that HELL has risen to of late. *runs screaming into a wall*

Without any further ado, thank you to all of you~! Your notices of favorites and helpful comments and constructive criticism have all been very helpful. I hope that you will find in this chapter that I have improved the work. As much as circumstances and consistency would allow, anyway (after all, I started this fic with a heavy sense of flippancy).

So, thank you all! For sticking around, for clicking a few extra buttons on the page. =D And now, if it is possible, please enjoy the final installment of "Fireflies."

* * *

When the sorcerer's apprentice came just days later, it was in the middle of the night and without ceremony.

The Nihilia attacks spiked after the night they claimed each other and their fates, leaving them exhausted even when they set out that final night to re-light the lamps and defend the city. It took Axel longer than usual, leaving him too taxed and sluggish to even light half of them. Once he'd lit up the city enough to be defensible, he found Roxas on the Tower and settled in close to the boy, leaning into his shoulder for support. Not much was there, the slim shoulders doing leaning of their own. He tugged the blond close to his chest and kissed his hair. Roxas burrowed his face against him.

"I have a bad feeling, Axel."

Since the night of Roxas's new dream, he'd dreamed of nothing else but intangible, eternal darkness and sheer, patient terror. He was more exhausted than Axel from the strain of nightmares and their work and Axel was determined to ward off the Nihilia on his own. So far tonight, he'd not had opportunity. For all their fervor the night before, the monsters might not have existed now, the silence of the city almost believably peaceful.

"I have a really, really bad feeling, Axel," Roxas reiterated, fingers curled in his friend's shirt.

"Is it the Nihilia?" Axel asked, trying to sense them."

"That's part of it – they're not _anywhere_. And look—" He pulled out of Axel's arms then and rose, summoning his swords. The paired blades, once shining and elaborate wonders of steel and filigree, were dull, the details lost and simplified and the structure cracked and crumbling.

"What _happened_?" Axel exclaimed, unfamiliar with all the wear and tear that had occurred. He hadn't thought the Nihilia had been that hard on them.

"I don't know. They were normal last night, but tonight… And you!" The boy sagged. "You won't like me saying it, but you look _mortal_ tonight."

"_Mortal_?" Axel asked.

Roxas shrugged. "You always… feel otherworldly to me, ethereal or something, a presence I could discern from any other. Now I don't think I'd know you from one of the guards in a pinch."

Axel scraped a hand back through his red spikes, swearing. "That's bad. Should we go talk to Sinclair?"

"She can't help us."

Axel began an optimistic protest and froze, giving his lover a dark look of realization. "You think the apprentice is here, don't you?"

Roxas turned his face away. "The thought had crossed my mind."

"So you're just giving up?"

Rage soured the boy's features then, and he held up the obsolete Keyblades. "What's left for us, Axel?" He snapped. "The Nihilia aren't even _here_! Even our weapons know we're not needed anymore!"

"You don't know that."

"And neither do you!" Roxas snapped, biting his lip. "You don't know _anything_."

Axel snarled, and thought better of it. Instead he stood and embraced the boy, whether he liked it or not, and held him close. "That's not true and you know it. _You're_ the one who taught me to read."

"I can't face it, Axel," Roxas shook his head, burying his face in Axel's warm chest. "I don't _want_ to die."

Axel sighed. "I thought you wanted to escape what's in store for you."

"I _do_! I want to run away! Find the beaches like in the books and hide out there for a hundred years!"

A deep-throated vibration shook in the air, surrounding them and drowning out all sense of self and power in the flash of a second.

_Come._

Then it was gone, leaving them weak and shaken.

Axel knelt before the boy, mind spinning with memories of joy as he ran the city under an open sky of stars, lighting the lamps and leaping from building to building for the sheer pleasure of it. It was all he'd known. Before him, Roxas trembled, eyes gazing out over Axel's head, unseeing. The beckon call had only justified his apprehension and now he was pale with fear.

"No more tears, beloved," Axel murmured, finding the strength to rise and wiping the trails of warm wetness from Roxas's cheeks. "Didn't you say you would try? Come on, to the very end. Let's see it through. We've nothing to fear."

Roxas bit his lip against more tears, scowling at the redhead before him. "What inspired this burst of bravery?"

Axel found a smile and offered it. "I don't belong to anyone but you, and you're no one's but _mine_. 'Til the very end. You promised, and so did I. There's nothing to do now but to face it." He took Roxas's hand and rose. "Shall we?"

Even as another beckoning thrummed through the air, Roxas stared long and hard at Axel, gaze clear and unwavering. Finally, he squeezed Axel's hand. "Fine. Why not? Let's spit in their faces and go out with a bang."

Grinning, Axel squeezed his hand back and they set out for the Gatehouse. "That is exactly what I had in mind."

***

Deep in his chest, Axel had a bad feeling too. He hadn't noticed it, being brave for his lover and bringing that smile back and the sardonic fight to his eyes, but he noticed it now as they walked a familiar route along unfamiliar, firelit streets. At first, it only felt small; an echo of what ailed Roxas in dreams and precognition. As their feet moved them at a mortal's pace along the cobbled streets, the dread grew into a pulsing, nauseating urgency deep in his gut.

The urge told him to run, far and fast, regardless of running from a sorcerer and a city with no world outside its walls.

Nasty and squirming, the feeling erupted into smaller needs; _take his hand_ and _take him on your back, run!_

Shaking his head, Axel captured Roxas's hand for a brief, tight squeeze, and released it again, defying screaming instinct. _Dawn_, he decided. _At dawn I'll take him into the next world with me._ And until then, he'd take orders from nothing and no one, not even his own will to survive.

***

It took most of the night to reach the Gatehouse. The air had pulsed twice more with the beckon call while they walked, and Axel had only needed to exchange a brief look with Roxas to know the younger man had no intention of hurrying. Axel had smirked and stopped to press him hard against a nearby wall, crushing a bruising kiss against Roxas's willing mouth. They tangled tongues there at their leisure, caressing and squeezing and pressing close all the while.

As far as Axel was concerned, the sorcerer could go fuck himself while he waited. They would give him plenty of time to do so. With a final kiss, Axel pulled away and they began wordlessly to walk again, both knowing their cell was no longer theirs for when dawn came. An arm around Roxas this time, Axel found himself looking around the city in the last of the night's blackness, eyes drinking in hungrily the curling, tossing flames in their bowls and lamps and buckets and pitchers and the firegold cast of light against tumbling and tumultuous buildings where people yet slept. The dread rose in his belly again, a realization that he marched to his death and that every leisure he spared himself now would make leaving the world that much harder.

Not to mention his promise to Roxas.

All this coiled in a rigorous lump of twisting and turning in his torso, just beneath his heart, so that when the Gatehouse loomed into sight, a veritable stone of bad feeling and will to live and sorrow and shame and regret fell, heavy and hard, into the pit of his belly.

All around the sky had turned to slate. Sinclair and her troupe of night guardsmen had assembled outside the Gatehouse, at attention and in formation, silent and staring. Only Sinclair moved her eyes as the pair approached from an adjacent street, and in the stony gaze Axel thought he saw a divided loyalty.

_Shit_, he thought, realizing what she felt, _she got attached to us, in her own way._

The sorcerer himself was nearby, attended by a few plainly robed youths hidden by black cloaks and black cowls with silver drawstrings. The apprentice himself was a grander affair, a dark-skinned man with a young face and a chastely spiked array of silver hair. His eyebrows were also silver, and angled compassionately, but beneath them his gold eyes were hard and calculating. His coat was a vivid white, traced with unfamiliar and elaborate silver patterns. When he spoke, his voice was deep and flowed at a gentle rate, a cloak of tenderness and understanding.

Axel put an arm around Roxas's shoulders, to soothe the younger man's trembling if not to hide it, as the words met them.

"Ah, at last you have arrived, Demon of Light and Creature of Darkness. I've waited so long to meet you."

_I bet,_ Axel thought sourly, forcing his face to blankness. No sense in picking fights here.

"Come, certainly my master left you capable of speech."

"Axel,"he grunted of himself, and tilted his face toward Roxas. "This's Roxas."

The man smiled, giving his cold eyes a predatorial gleam. "I am Xemnas, apprentice of Ansem, who is no more."

_Oh yeah,_ Axel thought to himself, _when I die, I'm going to beat the shit outta him while I'm there._

"I am here," Xemnas continued in his deep, soothing voice, "to bring peace to your city at last. No doubt you've already noticed the effects."

Roxas twitched under Axel's arm, voice expressionless but to Axel's carefully honed ears; the redhead caught undertones of anger and curiosity. "You destroyed the Nihilia?"

"No, I cannot do that," Xemnas replied. "I've only set up better protection against them than what my master left in his place. Master Ansem had something similar up before he died, but… well… the residue of his magic in you two was not enough to keep them functioning, it seems. No doubt he left you capable of battling the Nihilia should this happen."

Roxas drew the Keyblades then, the dull flash of their appearance upstaged by their crumbling skeletons. Within moments, they were powder and dust at his feet.

Xemnas smiled. "It is good I came, I see."

By the shifting of his lover's jaw, Axel guessed Roxas had some very searing things to say to that and was grinding his teeth instead of letting the apprentice have it. He squeezed the younger man's shoulders gently, trying to impart that he understood and felt the same, but that it would compromise their final mission. _We can neither fight him nor embrace him._ Axel shifted his hand and kneaded the back of Roxas's neck, needing the distraction as much as the blond did.

Xemnas stepped closer then, eyeing both studiously as he circled them. It was a slow rotation, and Axel felt his blood heat up impatiently; he disliked being stared at and evaluated like a cut of meat. It was to him that Xemnas spoke first.

"I'm afraid I'll have to split you up," he said at last, eyes on Axel first. "You, Demon of Light, are far too tricky to maintain – sensitive to sunlight, feeding only on moon and star light. I'll be keeping you," he said smoothly to Roxas, "to observe exactly what my master created before he died. He seems to have left no record of either of your creations, and I am curious to see if I can replicate the process."

Beside Axel, Roxas was very pale. His trembling could not be hidden now. Xemnas acknowledged it with a curling smile, amusement lining his deep tones. "Really, it's not as if you're so human you can know true fear. Stop that."

From grey, the sky was changing to a muted cobalt – the color of Roxas's eyes in the warm, deep darkness of their cell and their bed. Judging it was time, Axel did then something he'd never done before. Under his tongue, he conjured the smallest of fireflies, giving it every spark and ribbon of power he could manage until a searing, tiny bomb sizzled hidden beneath his tongue, burning even him. He hoped it was enough.

Turning to Roxas suddenly, he grabbed the collar of the boy's shirt and kissed him hard, shoving the firefly hard into the back of his throat and guiding it with the last of his magic down his esophagus and into his body. Though he still trembled, Roxas's body revealed none of this, but his eyes burned with pain. Axel wrapped his arms hard around him, clutching him close one last time and feeling the familiar body rise to unnatural temperatures. Grunting, the boy wrapped his arms tight around Axel, smoldering flesh warm against Axel's back where they burned away his shirt. Out the corner of Axel's eye, Xemnas stepped rapidly closer, arms raised and face burning disapproval, shadowed deeply by the first shimmering rays of the rising sun.

Roxas's voice was the last thing Axel heard, the boy's hoarse whisper half-realized as he formed it with ruined lips and died halfway through the sentiment.

_Thank you_.

Vivid gold in the center and firey, bloody red around the edges, the sun rose over the wall and cast golden, warm beams of light down upon them.

In that instant, he forgot Roxas burning in his arms and searing his clothing. He forgot Xemnas, and the pulse of forming magic around the sorcerer, cubes of power taking shape about him. He forgot Sinclair and her squad and their faces identically agape and horrified.

He forgot arms, legs, shape, form, voice, breath, and body until all he knew was sunlight, and all he _was_ could be sunlight, warm and floating-free and glowing softly, burning brightly and heating the world. _This_ he remembered, and wondered how he could have ever forgotten the sensation of touching every dark corner and bringing it illuminating warmth or glinting off dust motes afloat in the air – sweet air, all around, fueling everything he was…

_Like Roxas._

He wrapped himself around the boy now in ways he never could before, when he'd been trapped in that dark, awkward, limited body. Here he searched the ashes for it and found it at last – the final spark.

_Firefly?_

No. Deeper, bigger and smaller, brighter and darker. Simply _more_ than a firefly. Fireflies had only been a part of his sunlight-splintered, moon-fed soul. This _was_ a soul, the whole thing, and he cradled it in all he could recollect of himself, carrying it high into the brightening sky.

_Not the sun?_

No. To the last of the darkness lingering in the zenith, to the stars he was sure lingered beyond. There were dark corners yet to be lit there, by the sunlight, and the warm soul nestled in a swath of golden dawn and what remained of him, would guide him there.

It was all he'd ever needed.


End file.
